Jonathan Rosenberg

3 min read

Cisco Spark teams is really simple. A team is a group of people working together. Anyone can create a team and then add users to it. A team can have any number of rooms, which are topic-specific rooms used by that team. Anyone in a team can create these “team rooms.” As a team member, I can easily see all the team rooms I’m not in, check them out, and join or leave them at will. That makes Cisco Spark a great experience for new users joining the app for the first time, or joining a new team.

3 min read

We all know the story of Goldilocks and her ill-fated visit to the house of the three bears. What lesson, if any, one might take away from this story is that too much of a good thing doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing. Big chairs are big, but if they’re too big, they’re not comfortable. What is true for Goldilocks – and bear with me on the analogy – is also true when considering security technologies for business. When evaluating messaging technologies, the question to think about is: What parties should have access to content, and which should not?

5 min read

Recently there has been a lot of buzz in the news around people getting fed up with enterprise messaging applications. This began with a well written and widely read article in Medium titled, “Slack I’m Breaking Up with You.” A twitter hashtag called #slacklash started to rise in usage. Others jumped on the same bandwagon […]

3 min read

Software testing. For a long time, software testing was one of those dark alleys of the software development process. Often ignored, considered as an afterthought, and staffed by “someone else” who did an important job but was outside of the core development process. Well, that has all changed. In the SaaS world – especially one […]

6 min read

One of the things I really believe strongly is that modern SaaS software development – both the practices and code it produces – are significantly different from traditional enterprise premises-based software development. Yet, I find that for people who have never built and operated a modern SaaS platform, these differences are difficult to grasp.

2 min read

This is part of a series on the evolution of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud platform, exploring the technical and design principles behind its unique architecture. In the last post in this series, Jens Meggers talked about the huge importance of user experience, and how essential it is to simplify, connect, and delight. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is […]

3 min read

Last week, I posted about our Project Thor, our effort at creating a royalty-free next-generation video codec. This post generated lots of comments – which is great! But also illustrated that there is a lot of confusion about what it means for something to be open. I’d like to remedy that here and describe the […]

2 min read

Video codecs remain an area of active research and development. The current generation video codec is H.264 – in widespread usage on the Internet. Cisco has actively worked towards making H.264 the foundation of real-time communications on the web. The next generation codecs are just beginning to emerge. There are two of note – Google’s […]

2 min read

For those following trends in the software industry, Continuous Delivery (CD) has been all the rage. What is it? Simply put – continuous delivery is the ability of a SaaS application to push new software into production multiple times per day. Typically, only the cloud software components are updated at this rate. Client code – […]