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Would you leave the windows to your house open? Or the front door wide open? In this weeks vodcast from [...]

Corporate news content isn’t very social by nature; historically, this includes some text-heavy press releases, maybe an earnings report, topped off with some ‘talking head’ videos. All is not lost. With a few simple (and some obvious) steps, you too can make your corporate news content social. Here are just 5 steps that we took for our corporate newsroom.

TORONTO, Ont., Oct. 29, 2010 – Cisco Canada has ranked first out of 121 companies surveyed, in Aon Hewitt’s annual ranking of the Best Employers in Canada. The Aon Hewitt study, conducted in conjunction with Queen’s University School of Business, recognizes the top employers in Canada based on employee responses. Cisco achieved the top ranking in only its second year of participating in the …

October 28, 2010 …

Today I have the pleasure of blogging about the final engineering milestone for Microsoft Lync 2010 – the next release of Office Communications Server and Communicator – also known as Release to Manufacturing, or RTM. We’re incredibly excited about this release as it’s really the culmination of a five-year journey to help customers transform the way they communicate. This platform has evolved over the past few years. Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007; released November 2007) introduced Communicator and a totally new experience for enterprise IM, presence and conferencing built into the Office applications people use every day. In February 2009, OCS 2007 R2, added on premise audio conferencing that was easy to manage, saved customers money, added core enterprise telephony features, and better supported collaboration through richer online meetings and ad hoc conversations via Communicator.

The Lync 2010 release takes collaboration and productivity to the next level by:

• Providing a single platform that integrates the various modes of communication necessary for people and businesses to be productive. It does this for the end user via a single client experience, and on the back-end with a unified infrastructure and management experience. We knew that for customers to see real value, they would need to achieve cost savings that come from bringing this all together as well as a smart interface to encourage user adoption.
• Enabling an extensible and open platform that invites corporate and professional developers around the world to help us provide customers with greater flexibility. Many developers are already reshaping their business models based on the Lync platform. For example, Joe Schurman, a Microsoft partner at Evangelyze Communications, recently said that the Lync platform “has forever changed how our organization develops and produces software.” The success here will be driven by our open approach to interoperability which enables Lync to work with existing communications systems while implementing a single API set across all modes of communication, simplifying the developer experience.
• Rounding out enterprise voice capabilities so that Lync can help the broadest set of customers reduce legacy infrastructure costs and enhance that infrastructure with an incredibly rich set of softphone capabilities. Employees are able to work more effectively from home, on the road, or in any number of evolving workplace scenarios.
• Supporting our partner community by enabling them to provide an optimized experience with Lync. This is exemplified by the enormous range of devices available from partners around the world. We and our partners will have a ton more to say about the advances here at launch.

What’s next for Lync?  The final milestone is general availability (GA), which means making Lync 2010 available to customers and partners around the world. We’re on track for GA and planning a worldwide launch event on Wednesday, November 17, 2010. We hope you’ll tune in here: http://www.microsoft.com/lync to watch live demos of the final product, see examples from the more than 100 new Lync certified devices and hear from customers who have deployed early releases of Lync 2010. The launch event, to be broadcast live, will feature a keynote from Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft Office Division, who will talk about how Lync fits into Microsoft’s broader productivity platform, including SharePoint, Exchange and Office. Chris will be joined by a few special guests, including Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Office Communications Group and Lync R&D team.

If you caught our Office 365 disclosure last week, you saw that the next version of cloud productivity from Microsoft will also deliver the 2010 suite of products, including Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and Lync, to customers of all sizes. Additionally, Lync Online will federate with consumer communication applications like Windows Live Messenger (now supporting high definition audio and video), and with IM and presence with AOL, Yahoo!, Google and Jabber. Getting connected with others is a beautiful thing!

On behalf of the entire team, I want to thank our customers and partners who have helped us reach this milestone. Kudos to the incredible Lync product team who have been marching hard with three major releases in as many years to deliver the platform our customers and partners have been waiting for. We look forward to hearing your feedback on Microsoft Lync.

Kirk Gregersen, Senior Director

SAN JOSE, Calif, – October 27, 2010 – Cisco has scheduled a conference call for Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 1:30 PM (PT) to announce its first quarter fiscal year 2011 financial results for the quarter ending Saturday, October 30. Financial results will be released over Marketwire, as well as the European Business and Technical Wire after the close of the market on Wednesday, …

How do I keep my personal information, personal online? What are the risks of losing confidential corporate data with so many employees using social media tools in the workplace? What is the best way to keep my family safe online? These questions and many more were answered as part of the latest Talk2Cisco episode; live from the Emergency Operations Center at Cisco headquarters in San Jose, California, featuring Cisco Senior Security Advisor, Christopher Burgess.

When Cisco led the voice industry into the world of Voice over Internet Protocol (Voice over IP, VoIP) in 1998, [...]

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 27, 2010 – Cisco today celebrated a major milestone with the distribution of its 30 millionth Internet Protocol (IP) phone to one of the world’s largest banking and financial services institutions, HSBC. As part of a standardization strategy to enable a uniform groupwide global standard, HSBC has already deployed over 100,000 Cisco® Unified IP Phones across 87 …

Leading Supplier of Business Essentials in Australia selects Cisco UCS.