How Squared are you?
Cisco’s Project Squared collaboration application has been out for just over a month now and we are seeing a great deal of positive interest in it. But, what are people using it for ? Here at Cisco , we have a people using Squared for a myriad of uses…one of our sales people is using a Squared room with just him and his wife in it to work out shopping lists…and that is the beauty and simplicity of the product, it’s not just for internal use, you can invite people from outside of your organisations to participate in a Squared room for both business and personal tasks.
Personally, I’m participating in several different Squared rooms, some with just a couple of people and others with a couple of hundred people. To be honest, as Squared is analogous to a virtual conference, project or war-room, a couple of hundred people may be a little over populated (imagine waling into a conference room with a hundred people in it !!), but people have been very excited about using Squared and the take-up within Cisco has been tremendous. I’m also using Squared for activities outside of work…next year, we are going on holiday to India with another couple and I have created a Squared room for the four of us to keep track of air tickets, hotel bookings, visa applications and ideas for doing the tourist things…everyone has found it incredibly useful to have a persistent repository of data, chats and photos which, thanks to Box, are available at the touch of a button (or the click of a mouse).
Another room that I created was for this year’s Cisco Connected Santa, where a team of volunteers go to various Children’s Hospitals around the UK and Ireland and using the magnificent capabilities of Cisco’s Telepresence, enable the children to have a “face-to-face” talk with Santa back in his Grotto…the Squared room is used for housing the photos that were taken, the various documents needed to ensure smooth operation at the hospitals and any chats amongst the volunteers.
One by product of using Squared is that I have seen my use of email reduce, especially when it comes to sending mails with large attachments. These are now posted in a Squared room and instantly accessible by those who need to see them rather than unnecessarily filling up the inbox of the poor folk who never wanted them in the first place 🙂 This also has the added benefit of giving back to the most important asset in an organisations…giving time back to the people, who are no longer overloaded with an inbox full of unread, and largely un-warranted, emails. Instead, they can go to their Squared room and peruse at their leisure…no more emails from IT telling me that my inbox is almost full and, unless I delete several megabytes of attachments/screen shots/presentations etc, I won’t be able to send and receive email.
Hopefully you can see that Squared can be used for many things, from the boardroom (or conference room…) to Santa.
So, what are you using Project Squared for ? I’m sure that there are many things you could be using it for…give it some thought and let the world know.
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