Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking

jdb — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:20:25 +0000

Recently, John Chambers, CEO Cisco, unveiled Cisco’s Innovation in the enterprise social networking and collaboration space. Although, I hadn’t in the past thought of Cisco to be one of the players leading the charge on enterprise social networking, Chambers was unveiling the many products they’ve packaged together to provide a comprehensive platform for supporting enterprise social networking and collaboration. Although, I am extremely pleased with what Cisco is doing in the tele/video collaboration space, I am not all that convinced about their other offerings in the enterprise social networking space.

Firstly, web 2.0 technologies are still very much evolving. Plunking down a lot of money to get something that is a combination of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc may not be the most ideal toolset for supporting a vibrant and organic social network in the enterprise (while at the same time boosting productivity). Additionally, even with a successful social networking program implemented at an organization, one cannot fully rely on just the employees to tag and categorize data for consumption. Organizations, don’t have the critical mass (as is typically found on digg.com, twitter, etc) to self organize user generated content. This means that organizations have to invest in either manpower or provide some additional tools to self organize such information. It would be great if Cisco provided some tools to organize data meaningfully.

All in all, I believe Cisco’s real focus is where it needs to be, which is in the tele/video collaboration space. They’ve simply built some familiar web 2.0 concepts to enhance their current collaboration experiences (and perhaps to even keep observers from complaining that they are not a cool forward looking company).

Google Wave– More than just a mash-up of messaging and email

jdb — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:35:42 +0000

Google is helping redefine online communication and collaboration via Google Wave. With all the hype surrounding it, I was pretty excited to get the invite and try it out. My first impression is that it looks like a remodeled version of gmail+gchat, not necessarily even a better one and and that’s it. Nothing seemed particularly amazing about it. However, in the context of Google’s wider strategy targeting businesses, this could be the tsunami that wipes out the old way of doing business.

Organizations that have switched to Google can already use gmail for their email needs, Google Docs for their word processing, presentation and spreadsheet needs (well almost), and Google Calendar to set up events. The one critical piece that was missing was a rich framework to enable various forms of collaboration. Google Wave provides exactly that. The out of the box Google Wave provides a rich interface to collaborate effectively with many in real-time or asynchronously over a period of time. This facility can however be extended for all types of interactions. For example, a company in Australia extended Google Wave to support a collaborative business process modeling framework, where participants can collaborate with each other as they work through flushing out a large scale process model. At any given point in time there could be one or more people working on the model.

Adoption is not large scale yet, given the nascent status of some of google’s technology. However, given time and some much needed enhancements (to be covered in a different post) more and more meaningful extensions will be developed and more and more businesses will join the wave to conduct their business.

Google Docs – Microsoft Office Killer By Next Year?

TechSized » collaboration

Cisco’s Foray into Enterprise Social Networking

Google Wave– More than just a mash-up of messaging and email