As the market continues to centralise on the unification of voice, video, messaging, presence and conferencing and extending communications out to customer and team meeting environments, delivering a unified experience for the users becomes even more important.

To that end, Cisco are moving to a new time-based system releases for their Collaboration Systems Release (CSR), with a major update planned around every six months. These updates will include improvements across the collaboration suite from endpoints to mobile clients to voice and video infrastructure.

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

Instead of a complex set of solutions, Cisco aim to deliver a seamless interconnected service 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.

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: Multi-streaming for best performance, highly scalable virtual MCUs, MS Lync RDP support for two-way content sharing with MS 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.