There are a variety and growing number of tools on the market to help enterprises become more collaborative. Virgin Media, the U.K. cable operator with 5 million customers, has made a year-and-a-half migration toward being more collaborative. Colin Miles, head of technical services for the company, says Virgin explored Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Jive and others. In the second half of last year, Virgin undertook a 1,000 user trial using Cisco's Quad, which the company renamed WebEx Social this week. The Cisco system, he says, integrates WebEx video collaboration with unified communications and social collaboration tools, whereas Jive and Microsoft, he says, only excelled in the text-based collaboration feature set. In an effort to drive employees to use a unified control system, Virgin chose the platform with all those feature sets.
As part of the company's annual survey this year, employees who were part of the initial pilot reported a seven-point bump in employee engagement compared to workers not in the pilot. "Workers feel more connected with each other and customers," Miles says. "That's a win-win."
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
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