Cisco unveiled a variety of innovations that will make it possible for people to participate in social collaboration, regardless of where they are working, by bringing social capabilities to the devices and applications that workers use most often.

The innovations pertain to what is now called Cisco WebEx Social (formerly known as Cisco Quad) and build upon existing offerings that help employees share knowledge, find experts and information, and form effective virtual work teams.

Cisco is extending WebEx cloud services to not only encompass what was formerly known as Quad, but also Cisco Callway, Cisco’s hosted TelePresence solutions. Cisco is aligning its Quad and Callway brands with WebEx where they join a market leading portfolio of web conferencing and instant messaging solutions. By bringing a comprehensive solution to the cloud, Cisco provides users and IT with easy access to their social collaboration tools of choice from any device.

The expanded WebEx family of cloud collaboration services will utilise the global data centre footprint and operational excellence of the WebEx cloud to deliver highly available, real-time cloud services that meets the needs of the most demanding organisations. The WebEx cloud is the world’s second-largest public cloud for business collaboration applications.

WebEx Social helps broaden participation by enabling employees working on mobile devices, email, and  personal productivity applications to easily engage in social collaboration with their colleagues.

It also unifies social and real-time collaboration solutions – like video, voice, instant messaging (IM), presence and web conferencing - into a single, integrated user experience. This not only gives users immediate access to the right tools at the right time, but can drive higher and faster adoption of new collaborative ways of working. WebEx Social offers new compelling real-time video experiences and deeper integration with WebEx conferencing.

While accessing WebEx Social via a Web browser, people can initiate voice and HD video calls without going to a separate application. WebEx Social includes an update for unified calendaring and an integrated WebEx experience. Users can view, join and start meetings directly from the WebEx Social personal calendar.

Both the Cisco WebEx Social Web interface and the mobile client feature new, highly intuitive user experiences that make it simple for anyone to get started. On the web interface, employees can easily personalise their experience by adding approved applications and choosing layouts. Organisations can also custom brand the WebEx Social Web and mobile interfaces to align with their corporate branding.