Cisco's collaboration platform is missing content management

Cisco has a big gap in its collaboration story that is preventing it from competing adequately against Microsoft - and IBM, which today launched Bluehouse online social networking and collaboration service - content management. Dave Rosenberg, writing in his Negative Approach blog, believes Cisco is "playing the collaboration game against companies that are rich in content management, and seem to be getting the communications part down," but that the core element - content - to its recent acquisitions of WebEx, Jabber, IronPort and PostPath is missing.

Rosenberg adds:

Ultimately, enterprises collaborate around documents, and Cisco appears to have little to no strategy on managing that content. It has lots of ways to talk about it, but seemingly lacks a central repository for storing, managing, auditing, and building workflows around that critical content.

He reckons that Cisco could do well to acquire a company like Jive Software, which provides collaboration and community software for enterprises. Jive also provides integration with Microsoft's SharePoint Server, so such an acquisition by Cisco would be interesting. Rosenberg also points to open-source content management vendor Alfresco as a possible partner for Cisco. Interesting, Alfresco is developing software that allows its product to act as a stand-in for SharePoint.

In September, Rosenberg wrote that Cisco's acquisition of Jabber presented it with a golden opportunity in open source.

More from Cisco Subnet:
* Cisco slaps down MDS death rumor
* VACL capture provides Cisco customers an unlimited number of SPAN ports
* Cisco unified communications home labs series
* Credit card skimming: How thieves can steal your card info without you knowing it
* DMVPN: How this Cisco IOS technology can help cut 70% off your corporate phone bill, Part 1
Go to Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.