ACE Network: Experience the Newly Improved Cisco Jabber Universal Client

One client for all communications: That’s the idea behind the new Cisco Jabber and I’m seeing that benefit in my use of this universal communication client. I start the client when I begin my work and use it throughout the day for voice and video calls, to send instant messages to others on my team, and to join WebEx sessions or Cisco TelePresence meetings. In addition to these features, the client also supports Desktop Sharing and Presence, which lets me know the availability status of my teammates at all times.

To illustrate my point about where the real difference lies between the old and new client, consider this scenario. Previous to this new release, users had two different clients talking to two back-end platforms: Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Cisco UCM) and Cisco Video Communication Server (Cisco VCS). The new Cisco Jabber client talks to only one platform: Cisco UCM.

As a result, the client integrates functions that were in the separate tools I used before, such as Cisco WebEx Connect for soft phone and instant messaging (IM), and the Cisco Jabber Video for TelePresence (Movi) client for video calls. For me, one of the most attractive features of this new client is how it makes it easy to conduct video calls, which I discuss in a related post.

Without a doubt, not having to move from tool to tool because of the integration in Cisco Jabber is a big timesaver. In fact, Cisco salespeople who have tested Cisco Jabber say that it saves them almost 18 minutes per day, which would give Cisco a productivity gain of US $108 million each year if the client was used by all of our salespeople. And that’s just Cisco Jabber alone!

Cisco’s Dave Fredericks, a Senior Systems Engineering Manager, had this to say about the impact of Cisco Jabber on his work: “With the decreased amount of personal space on flights today, the Jabber client allows me to take only my iPad for business travel. The client gets a lot of attention from people who are fascinated to see how easily I’m able to connect across multiple locations, to use presence to know when my peers are available, send them a quick IM or call them right on the spot to get the answers I need for my customers,” says Fredericks.

I’ve been using Cisco Jabber on our internal ACE service introduction network, where we test products before supporting them in production IT. From this testing, the team has learned about the network and access configurations that need to be set correctly in order for Cisco Jabber to deliver a good user experience.

Specifically, we make sure that the voice and video streams are going into the right QoS queues so they can maintain high performance levels. We are working to support a single user sign-on capability for the IM capability in Cisco Jabber and in our internal WebEx Social sharing platforms. We also verify that the security configurations are set correctly for each device type in order to allow what are normally untrusted laptops and mobile devices to communicate securely over our network switches.

Another factor in our planning for production rollout is the expected user adoption rate for this new client. We can’t assume that all of our users will automatically download and begin using Cisco Jabber because people often have a strong attachment to familiar clients. Today, this Cisco Jabber client is only available for iPad and Windows, but you can expect to see other platforms very soon, and with that, future blog posts on the evolution of Cisco Jabber here at Cisco.

This post is part of a series about the Cisco IT ACE Service Introduction Network. You’ll find more information in these related posts: