As our Intranet business team worked through the use of social media on our own intranet, we had the benefit of leveraging Cisco’s wider expertise. It is one of the benefits of working at a company like Cisco, literally you can find an expert on pretty much anything.
One of the strongest thought leaders that influenced our strategy was Keith Griffin, the lead architect of enterprise collaboration platform business unit. The results of his efforts can be seen in Cisco Quad, which is the technical foundation of our own social intranet strategy.
There is a great interview with Keith about harnessing the power of the social graph in PWC’s “Technology Forecast: Transforming collaboration with social tools” where Keith describes how emerging social and graph data technology can remove barriers to more effective collaboration … now you can harness the power of Keith like we did.
Collaboration has always been an important factor for successful businesses. Heck, it’s an important factor for successful relationships, conversations, parking-lot navigation. Wherever more than one person is involved in a process of any sort, collaboration is a must for that process to succeed.
Collaboration, plain and simple.
So (don’t tell my manager this…), it was initially a bit funny to me that we would have a “Collaboration architecture.” I got the whole Data Center thing – a data center is and always has been a big ol’ box of technology. But to me, collaboration was always a human interaction, relationship, agreement to cooperate. Maybe it’s all of the organic vegetables and driving a hybrid that kept me resistant to considering collaboration as a technology architecture. Read More »
Here’s a Thursday quick quiz: What integrates social networking, voice, video, and unified communications into one workspace? Is it:
a) Facebook
b) Microsoft Office
c) Cisco Quad
If you chose “c” then go get yourself an ice cream cone! But seriously, Cisco Quad, just like your ice cream cone, is pretty sweet—it’s a powerful enterprise platform that can improve business productivity, and accelerate growth by bringing content, business applications, communications, and enterprise social software into a single, intuitive experience.
So how does it work? Quad is a truly unified communications platform, with blogs and wikis. Users can also schedule meetings and engage in instant messaging, voice, and video communication, as well as manage and share documents.
Ready to leverage Quad at your own office? Right now, partners can take advantage of the QuadNow program, which offers Quad at a significant discount—95% off the list price.
Read on for details on the program, as well as to watch a demo of how Quad works.
Last week Cisco announced that Minter-Ellison, one of the largest full-service law firms in the Asia Pacific region, selected Quad as their collaborative workspace, supporting their ‘One Firm’ vision. This is part of a broader rollout of Cisco technology by Minter-Ellison to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing between their 290 partners and 1,000 legal staff based in Australia, Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
We will create, share and curate content on these topics as a part of our overall Cisco voice. We have also commissioned world-class reporters who have worked at Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, AP and more to create content on our core technology news topics. The purpose of these stories isn’t to showcase Cisco, but to create compelling content in the topical areas that we care about.
Check out this introductory video on “The Network” to learn more about the new site!
