Collaboration means working together to achieve a common goal. Not very long ago, the best way for people to collaborate was for them to be in the same location at the same time so that they were in direct contact with each other. In today’s globalized economy with decentralized business resources, outsourced services, and increasing costs for office facilities and travel, bringing people together in the same physical location is not the most efficient or effective way to collaborate. But with Cisco Collaboration Solutions, workers can now collaborate with each other anytime, anywhere, with a substantial savings in time and expenses.
Cisco Collaboration Solutions support the full range of voice, video, and data communications, including the latest advances in mobile communications and social media. Cisco Collaboration Solutions also provide an extensive set of applications and services that can be deployed either on premises or in the cloud.
Cisco has long been recognized as the world leader in routing and switching technology. This technology forms the core of the network infrastructure for Cisco Collaboration Solutions. The Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms available on Cisco switches and routers ensure that the voice, video, and data communications will be of the highest quality throughout the network. In addition, Cisco gateways provide a number of methods for connecting your enterprise’s internal network to an external wide area network (WAN) as well as to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and to legacy systems such as a PBX. And for a smooth transition into the future, the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) enables Cisco partners to offer customers cloud-based, hosted collaboration services that are secure, flexible, low-cost, scalable, and always current with the latest technology. Cisco also produces several platforms for processing and controlling collaboration sessions. These platforms can provide collaboration services for small and medium businesses, and they can scale up to handle large global enterprises such as Cisco.
For example, Cisco Business Edition 3000 is a cost effective and efficient collaboration solution for small businesses of up to 300 users, while Cisco Unified Communications Manager can scale up to support collaboration services for many thousands of users. In addition, Cisco Unified Communications Manager can be installed as an application on a virtual machine using Open Virtualization Archive (OVA) templates. In most cases you will want your collaboration sessions to be secure. That is why Cisco has developed a number of security mechanism to protect each level of the collaboration path, from the network core to the end-user devices.
Once your collaboration solution is implemented, you will want to monitor and manage it. Cisco has developed a wide variety of tools, applications, and products to assist system administrators in provisioning, operating, monitoring and maintaining their collaboration solutions. With these tools the system administrator can monitor the operational status of network components, gather and analyze statistics about the system, and generate custom reports.
Collaboration Applications and Services
Cisco Collaboration Solutions incorporate a number of advanced applications and services, including:
- Instant messaging (IM) and presence — The Cisco IM and Presence Service enables Cisco Jabber, Cisco Unified Communications Manager applications, and third-party applications to increase user productivity by determining the most effective form of communication to help connect collaborating partners more efficiently.
- Collaborative conferencing — Cisco WebEx incorporates audio, high-definition (HD) video, and real-time content sharing in a platform that provides easy setup and administration of meetings, interactive participation in the meeting, and the ability to join the meeting from any type of device such as an IP phone, a tablet device, or a desktop computer.
- Telepresence — Cisco TelePresence technology brings people together in real-time without the expense and delay of travel. The Cisco TelePresence portfolio of products includes an array of high-definition (HD) video endpoints ranging from individual desktop units to large multi-screen immersive video systems for conference rooms. And Cisco TelePresence products are designed to interoperate with other Cisco collaboration products such as Cisco WebEx and Cisco Unified IP Phones with video capability.
- Voice messaging — Cisco products provide several voice messaging options for large and small collaboration systems, as well as the ability to integrate with third-party voicemail systems using standard protocols.
- Customer contact — Cisco Unified Contact Center products provide intelligent contact routing, call treatment, and multichannel contact management for customer contact centers. Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal can be installed as a standalone interactive voice recognition (IVR) system, or it can integrate transparently with the contact center to deliver personalized self-service for customers. In addition, Cisco SocialMiner is a powerful tool for engaging with customers through the social media.
- Call recording — Cisco MediaSense can capture, preserve, and mine conversations for business intelligence and can provide real-time monitoring of customer conversations with contact center personnel.
