Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 3)

The following is Part 3 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Note: Update to remove name of portal vendor until official announcement.

Clarifications & Questions

As the launch event and collaboration summit progress, additional information will be provided. Areas where I have questions and will be looking for clarification include:

Hosted e-Mail

• Specifics on mail migration support (professional services, tools).
• Specifics on hybrid models (some Exchange inboxes are likely to remain on-premises).
• Specific details on how e-Discovery, audit, and compliance needs are addressed.
• Will there be any calendaring migration concerns (not explicitly mentioned)?
• Cisco needs to compare/contrast its approach with Microsoft’s BPOS – not just e-mail but overall to equate synergies from other WebEx Collaboration Cloud services.
• Is there a Notes/Domino compete opportunity too?

Show And Share

• How are storage and records management requirements satisfied?
• Are there any network management concerns?
• There will likely raise privacy issues – what are the EU implications for instance? Is there an opt-out or consent (opt-in) capability?
• ISSupport for record/playback conferencing systems?

Enterprise Collaboration Platform

• What are the specifics of portal deal?
• Does the deal include all capabilities of the portal vendor's software?
• Will the portal be available for both on-premises and SaaS? Will functional parity be attained between SaaS and on-premises?
• Is there Wave support (federation)?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the portal market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the content management market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle as well best-of-breed vendors like EMC? Will there be a partnership coming with EMC given the virtual computing environment partnership?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the search market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
• Does Cisco believe it is competing in the Enterprise 2.0 market with Microsoft, IBM, Jive, and others (Telligent, Socialtext, Atlassian…)?
• Where is the application development story given the SOA, Rest and other interfaces for collaborative applications? Given the portal is open source – how will Cisco interact with that community?
• Where is the social media play? What is the touch point between ECP and EOS?

Pulse

• Do organizations want this at the network layer vs. other alternatives that are based on activity streams?
• How does Pulse honor permission models (authentication, authorization and access controls)?
• Are there privacy (EU, labor unions, worker councils) concerns with Pulse? Is there a model that supports opt-in consent?

Comments

[Nick Mehta]

Hi Mike,

> Specific details on how e-Discovery, audit, and compliance needs are addressed.

My company (LiveOffice) has been working with the Cisco WebEx Mail team and just announced today the ability to archive email from Cisco WebEx mail for e-discovery and compliance purposes.

You can read more at:
http://www.liveoffice.com/archiving/CloudMerge-archiving-platform.asp

Nick