Cisco Builds its Collaboration Portfolio

Cisco expanded its collaboration portfolio of TelePresence, Unified Communications, and WebEx solutions with new tools for video and voice-based communications. . The company also announced its entrance into two new markets, enterprise social software and hosted email. The rollout includes:


Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory -- a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.


Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage -- a simple, one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing. Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage, combines Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center.


The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine -- gives end-users business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximizing network efficiency and reducing costs. This new solution, submitted today to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization, includes features such as business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities, including video, with multiple levels of built-in security, and will add additional capabilities in the future. Service providers will benefit from the ability to offer new business-to-business communications services, differentiated network capabilities, and expanded managed services.


Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0 -- extends support for a wide range of endpoints including new video- and WiFi-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phones and additional smartphones via Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. Cisco UC 8.0 also offers customers a choice of deployment models -- whether on-premise, on-demand, or hybrid.


Cisco WebEx Mail -- a new corporate-grade, hosted email solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimized mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access. Using technology acquired from PostPath, Cisco WebEx Mail has a highly scalable infrastructure that overcomes the limitations of traditional mailbox size. Cisco WebEx Mail is on-demand, highly available, and designed to free IT departments from the burden of email infrastructure management and operation.


Jabber Federated Presence -- using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco has integrated the XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0. The XMPP open standard allows presence federation among presence systems, both business and consumer, as well as support for third party enterprise instant messaging clients and applications.


Cisco Show and Share -- a social video system that helps organizations create and manage highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimize global video collaboration, and personalize the connection between customers, employees, and students, with user-generated content. It allows organizations to record, edit and share video with comments, ratings, tagging and RSS feeds, and speech-to-text transcripts can be uploaded for easy video search and viewing.


Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform -- an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments 'on the fly' and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and web 2.0 content. Unlike today's document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions.
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