I was introduced to Cisco Quad today, see the video here. My initial thoughts were wow Cisco must be confused because they created functionality similar to SharePoint 2010 My Sites. Makes you wonder if anyone over at Cisco has seen the new 2010 functionality? For the last two years I've heard how Cisco is trying to break into the market place and try to compete with SharePoint.....First with the integration with WebEx Connect & Meeting Place - let me tell ya that POS kills my machine each time I use it. To this day I prefer straight up Meeting Place. Anyway getting off topic. I like to see competition, but I don't see an advantage just yet. I imagine Cisco will eventually get the idea and learn it needs to INTEGRATE with SharePoint and not compete. I see a few advantages of Quad, if you are Cisco centric organization using UC products great - you can call each other from inside Quad and avoid long distance charges, awesome...I guess. I'm tired and this post isn't well thought out, but I can't wait to start working with Quad and see what type of integration Cisco offers within SharePoint, if any. You would think they know SharePoint is a $1 billion dollar product.... I'm still unclear if Quad is web based or client based? I will be open to it, however I'm loyal to my Microsoft products and if it doesn't exist - build it or integrate it. If you plan on upgrading to SharePoint 2010 you have all the social networking you need, even if you have Cisco UC - integrate that with you OCS, bring OCS into SharePoint and bam you can make calls from inside SharePoint...how hard was that? Overall I really feel like this will be a tough sell for Cisco when working with existing hard core Microsoft clients. Depending on an organizations upgrade path this might be beneficial for someone who plans to be on SharePoint 2007 for the next 5 years.
Has anyone actually worked with Quad? I'd really like to explore it more.
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SG: Appreciate your candid comments on Quad! But like many other enterprise social solutions, yeah – they’re all going to include the basics (profile, communities, walls, etc.). What differentiates Quad from SharePoint and many others, is its commitment to an open (social) standard … I think long-term, as the ‘inside meets the outside’ and customers collaborate with employees directly, that will be way important. And, given Cisco’s large footprint in many enterprise networks, being ‘part of the network’ is also a strong selling point. I learned this at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Lots of good info http://www.e2conf.com/boston
Great blog. I’m a bit passionate about all-things-collaboration too … trying to become a bit more product agnostic, but certainly have a sweet spot for our friends at Microsoft. XXX ;)
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