"Pushing the Boundaries of Collaboration"
Air Date: November 20, 2008 at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST

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Collaboration – people sharing ideas and working together – is as essential to business success as great products and loyal customers. Innovative collaboration technologies, such as Web 2.0 and social networking applications, are transforming the way people communicate. These tools deliver a rich, immediate experience for their users, and often become indispensable parts of daily activity. However, when people go to work these same technologies can represent disruption – or even a threat – to their employers. Increasingly, businesses and their IT organizations struggle to close the gap between meeting users’ high expectations of an ideal communication experience and the business realities of protecting intellectual property and maintaining compliance.

Reconciling the openness and spontaneity of consumer collaboration environments with the business’ need for compliance and security is just one factor driving executives’ focus on collaboration. Businesses must meet this challenge because these new collaboration applications represent a fundamental change in the world’s social fabric – and therefore, in the culture of companies, their customers, partners, and suppliers. Collaboration is not limited to internal activities. It can dramatically improve businesses’ abilities to manage their demand and supply chains. In recent remarks to the industry, Cisco CEO John Chambers pointed out that collaboration will drive the next wave of corporate productivity – ultimately driving incremental gross domestic product growth.

Depending on the specific needs of their businesses, there are now ways to allow the openness and spontaneity that employees have come to expect while preserving the integrity of business operations. This episode of TechWiseTV brings you the best of the best - our top 3 technologies reshaping the world of collaboration:

Segment 1: The Collaboration Imperative - what is driving this change and how should it be dealt with?
Robb & Jimmy Ray debate the state of technology driven collaboration and set up the Top 3 Technologies to Watch in this space

• Cisco & Collaboration
  

Segment 2: Federated Presence - Dissolving Walls
Guest: Dave Lizotte, Solutions Architect for Cisco's Advanced Services Team

• Eric Krapf at NoJitter writes about the challenges in true federation
• See Dave Lizotte's Blog Entry on Federation
  

Segment 3: Telepresence Gets Personal, and affordable
Guest: Nathan Shaw, TME with the Telepresence Business Unit

• Telepresence Information
• The CTS 500
  

Segment 4: Webex: Not just another Pretty Face
Guest: David Knight, Director of Product Management for Webex
- What about the hidden value of the network running behind the scenes? Turns out Webex has a ton of cool engineering going on...'case study' in building a dedicated multi-media focused network: MediaTone.
- What has happened with Webex Connect lately?

• Media Tone Activity - ever wonder what it would look like to see all the 'collaborative' Webex' meetings occurring in real-time?
  
• Webex Connect Overview - very nice job on this one...these are usually boring. I think this one is highly informative and interesting.

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