Worldwide networking leader, Cisco, has announced a slew of innovations aimed at perfecting their social collaboration offering. Built upon existing offerings that enable employees to share knowledge, find experts, and form effective virtual teams, Cisco WebEx® Social (formerly known as Cisco Quad™), will deliver a multitude of new features that promise to ensure a more comprehensive social solution.

A brief overview of functionality includes the following: Microsoft Office integration will ensure that workers using Word, PowerPoint or Excel can jointly edit and upload updated documents, presentations and spreadsheets back to WebEx Social; owing to enhanced email integration, email will no longer necessarily be a siloed application, and workers can stay in email clients such as Microsoft Outlook while simultaneously creating and posting updates to WebEx Social; enhancements to the WebEx Social iPhone and iPad client will allow workers the ability to transition from social networking to real-time IM, web conferencing and voice calls directly from their mobile application; with new browser-based video calling, employees can escalate to a higher-definition (HD) video conferencing session without switching to a separate application; and customers will also have a choice of deployment models with WebEx Social being made available as either an on-premise (WebEx Social Server), partner-hosted (Logicalis, ACS and Alphawest), or Cisco-hosted offering.

“Designed for the enterprise, Cisco WebEx Social has enabled us to introduce social technologies in a highly secure, managed way not possible with consumer collaboration services. The collaborative communities in Cisco WebEx Social let us warehouse our intellectual capital and encourage lawyers to share their know-how with colleagues. Doing things more efficiently provides better value for our clients,” said Peter Westerveld, CIO, Minter Ellison.

In addition, Cisco has confirmed that WebEx Social will offer real-time video experiences and deeper integration with WebEx conferencing, HD video calling, WebEx integrated calendar, and new web and mobile interfaces (with the option for companies to custom brand the WebEx Social Web and mobile interfaces).

“More than ever, companies are rethinking the way they have traditionally done business to take a more social approach. With today’s announcements, Cisco is marrying the best of consumer social network features with a complete set of integrated collaboration cloud services for a seamless and integrated user experience. This new experience gives customers the option to securely participate in social business from the device and application of their choice,” said Murali Sitaram, Vice-President and General Manager, Cloud Collaboration Technology Group, Cisco.

WebEx Social Server will become globally available in July.