Collaboration Systems Release 11: Innovation and Integration for the Best Experience

If you’ve been following Cisco Collaboration, you know that we’re focused on the experience.  The whole experience:

• Product experience for users
• Sales and support experience for partners
• Purchase, deployment, and management experience for administrators

The market continues to centralize on unification of voice; video; messaging and presence; conferencing; and extending communications to customer and team meeting environments. Delivering a unified experience becomes even more important.

To that end, we moved to time-based system releases as a way to align feature delivery across development teams. This also lets us provide clarity across our entire collaboration portfolio. About every six months, a Collaboration Systems Release (CSR) updates a large portion of the software powering the collaboration experience. Improvements reach from endpoints to mobile clients to voice and video infrastructure.

As we continue to innovate with new cloud-based offerings like Spark and developer tools like Tropo, systems releases become more important.  All our collaboration experiences are “unified” or integrated. And they’re becoming increasingly connected across premises and cloud.

Instead of a complex set of solutions, we deliver seamlessly interconnected services with simple and intuitive paths from one to the other. For instance, you can:

• Start with IM and move to a voice call
• Start with Spark and move to multiparty video
• Start with group chat and move to a WebEx Personal Room from any video device

It’s about one experience for voice, video, content sharing, and messaging.

The significance is that we are delivering on our vision of a hybrid collaboration environment. We’re aligning development efforts and continually communicating that alignment to you. With this focused effort, you can be clear how we are protecting your investments in Cisco collaboration. And you can make an informed choice about when it’s best to migrate to the latest Cisco collaboration software (cloud or premises, endpoints and infrastructure).

Are You Ready to Migrate?

Here’s a taste of what’s new in CSR 11:

• Packaged Offerings: Simplified provisioning with configure-to-order tools for Business Edition 6000
• Video Conferencing: Multistreaming for best performance, highly scalable virtual MCUs, Lync RDP support for two-way content sharing with Lync endpoints, and proximity join for CMR Cloud
• Jabber: Jabber-to-Jabber calling, one-click Jabber-to-CMR escalations, Opus codec support, and far-end camera control
• Web Conferencing: Refreshed WebEx administrator interface, enhanced in-meeting controls and notifications, and more flexibility with integrated enhancements from WebEx Cloud Connected Audio
• Endpoints: New entry-level 8800 Series phones with HD video; mobile and remote-access support for 7800, 8800, and DX Series devices; Intelligent Proximity for content sharing and room-endpoint control from mobile devices
• Customer Collaboration: Finesse IP Phone Agent and Context Service for cloud-based storage, tagging, and management of customer-interaction data

If you haven’t taken advantage of some of the latest features and functionality delivered in Collaboration System Releases, now is the time.

For deeper details on CSR 11 and previous releases, see Mark Royle’s post “Collaboration System Release 11.0: Experience, Simplicity, Ubiquity” or the overview page.