Über technologist Michael Hickens writes about the recent Cisco announcement that they intend on competing with Google, Zoho and MOSS in the cloud collaboration space. I left a lengthy comment on this page, trying to come to grips with the meaning of this challenge. I titled my comment, "Cisco Office? Maybe they should consider Feng Office-in-the-Cloud". Good luck Conrado. Go get them.
Interestingly, Jason Harrop and i met Ms. Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. She was kind enough to refer me directly to David Knight, the technology director of Cisco's WebEX Conferencing initiative. Alex is quoted in a CNet article at:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10276549-92.html
Cisco is striving to redefine itself as a vendor connecting inner and outer clouds, thus reasserting its relevance in the context of a fluid Web-driven IT world increasingly dominated by the likes of Google, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It also hopes to parlay its legacy of infrastructure expertise into a reassuring presence, particularly for veteran IT administrators struggling to balance their in-house infrastructures against the cost-savings and potential efficiencies of cloud computing.
Real-time co-creation and co-editing: With Novell Vibe, people in your organization can author and edit online documents together, character by character, in real time. Teams can dramatically accelerate the completion of projects that used to take weeks. Because collaboration unfolds in a shared workspace, no one has to manually merge content from multiple contributors to create a unified, finished document.
Enterprise social messaging: As easy to use as Facebook or Twitter, Novell Vibe consolidates direct messages, chat, blogs and wikis from within Novell Vibe into one message stream. Creating new groups and inviting members from inside or outside your organization is as simple as sending an e-mail. You can even jumpstart ad-hoc conversations in seconds to tackle projects that can't wait.
File synchronization and management: Files on your desktop, regardless of authoring application, can be synchronized to the Novell Vibe file repository based in the cloud. As a result, users always work with the latest versions of important files on their desktops and in Novell Vibe.
The Novell Vibe unified message stream: Direct messages, social feeds and group conversations from within Novell Vibe are unified in one intuitive interface. This eliminates the need to constantly switch between locations to see all your content. Using powerful filtering, sorting and tagging capabilities, you can determine exactly what you want to see and whom you want to follow.
Advanced information management: Novell Vibe keeps a persistent record of all your work and conversations. Its comprehensive search function quickly locates files, messages, attachments, groups and people to save time and boost productivity.