Targeting businesses aiming to achieve new levels of cross-company communication and collaboration, Cisco is preparing to debut its new Web-based enterprise collaboration platform. Called “Quad,” after a university quadrangle, the platform is expected to be demonstrated next week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.
Originally called The Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform, Quad was announced last fall and made available in beta at that time. It combines a number of features and capabilities that have become familiar elements of social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, including real-time updates and status messages from selected colleagues, workplace groups, micro-blogging, and individualized “home pages.” The tool will also comprise more business-oriented features such as live video, calendars, e-mail, instant messaging, and the storage of documents available for collaboration. Quad will also interoperate with Cisco's WebEx collaboration platform and Telepresence high-definition videoconferencing systems.
Many companies and providers have expressed interest in bringing the power of social media to the workplace, but have hesitated because of the potential for time-wastage on social networks. Thus the market for “enterprise social networking” has been mostly theoretical to date.
Google recently opened up its online collaboration platform, Wave, to the general public after offering it as an invitation-only test product for several months. Developed by the pair of brothers behind Google’s phenomenally successful Maps technology, Wave is essentially a Web application that creates a shared online desktop where users can exchange real-time messages, share and edit text documents, images, and graphics, incorporate online Widgets, and keep track of ongoing projects and conversations.
“Two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, e-mail and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — e-mail mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls,” wrote Lars Rasmussen, who along with his brother Jens founded Where 2 Tech and later sold the mapping startup to Google, in a blog entry announcing the new offering. Wave, added Rasmussen, is designed to be “a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point.”
