Articles
The Dirty Secret of Team Collaboration: Teams
Cisco Spark is one of a growing set of tools that embrace the idea of team collaboration. These are tools that provide persistent workspaces for teams to work together. They provide persistent chat and messaging, file and photo sharing, and sometimes – real-time tools, such as voice and video confer…
A Lesson from Goldilocks: Messaging Security that’s “Just Right”
We all know the story of Goldilocks and her ill-fated visit to the house of the three bears. What lesson, if any, one might take away from this story is that too much of a good thing doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing. Porridge is best hot, but too hot and that’s not good. Big chairs are bi…
Fed Up with Enterprise Messaging? That’s Because Work Cannot Survive on Chat Alone
Recently there has been a lot of buzz in the news around people getting fed up with enterprise messaging applications. This began with a well written and widely read article in Medium titled, “Slack I’m Breaking Up with You.” A twitter hashtag called #slacklash started to rise in usage. Others jumpe…
The Hierarchy of SaaS Testing Needs
Software testing. For a long time, software testing was one of those dark alleys of the software development process. Often ignored, considered as an afterthought, and staffed by “someone else” who did an important job but was outside of the core development process. Well, that has all changed. In t…
Devops Means “No, you cannot operate my cloud”
One of the things I really believe strongly is that modern SaaS software development – both the practices and code it produces – are significantly different from traditional enterprise premises-based software development. Yet, I find that for people who have never built and operated a modern SaaS pl…
The Myth of Greenfield Technology Environments
This is part of a series on the evolution of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud platform, exploring the technical and design principles behind its unique architecture. In the last post in this series, Jens Meggers talked about the huge importance of user experience, and how essential it is to simplify, c…
The Four Dimensions of Open
Last week, I posted about our Project Thor, our effort at creating a royalty-free next-generation video codec. This post generated lots of comments – which is great! But also illustrated that there is a lot of confusion about what it means for something to be open. I’d like to remedy that here and d…
World, Meet Thor – a Project to Hammer Out a Royalty Free Video Codec
Video codecs remain an area of active research and development. The current generation video codec is H.264 – in widespread usage on the Internet. Cisco has actively worked towards making H.264 the foundation of real-time communications on the web. The next generation codecs are just beginning to em…
Continuous Delivery – realizing fast IT
For those following trends in the software industry, Continuous Delivery (CD) has been all the rage. What is it? Simply put – continuous delivery is the ability of a SaaS application to push new software into production multiple times per day. Typically, only the cloud software components are update…
7