How CustomWare helped Cisco Systems save with Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration

The Challenge

Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, contacted CustomWare with a unique "meeting scheduler" challenge for an impending virtual summit event that they were planning.

The Director's Summit in previous years was a high visibility live 3-day event held annually for the top 500 executives of Cisco Systems; the executives flew in from all over the world to a central location.

In true Enterprise 2.0 manner, this year the meeting would be virtual, with virtual "meeting sessions" for the executives instead. A unique collaborative system was required to allow for free form communication, as well as event registration and participation.

The Solution

CustomWare created a custom virtual meeting scheduler application inside an Enterprise Wiki (Atlassian Confluence) that would include a number of key features, such as:

  • Sign-up scheduling capability for all attendees of the 19 sessions. Sessions included global Q&A, regional events and "Spotlight" sessions
  • Properly managed timezones from around the world, both for meeting sign-up, as well as personal MS Outlook calendar (.ics) configurations
  • Enhanced profile information displays of all attendees
  • Interactive forum commenting between profiles including messaging and discussion forums
  • Management reports of sign-ups and session attendance
  • Statistics page listing those already registered, as well as what events they are signed up for
  • Scheduling ability to invite only certain people for some events
  • Controlled notifications to all registered, non-registered, and invited attendees

The Result

The result was an application development effort to create the Virtual Meeting Scheduler - a system likely to be reused many times by Cisco in their global strategy deploying Enterprise 2.0 solutions and systems.

Deployment of the custom Confluence plug-in application entailed installing the plugin in Cisco's Confluence staging and production servers, during development, testing, and deployment of the release.

The application had true global requirements, and successful implementation was also a global team effort across three continents. Cisco team members were located in California and the United Kingdom. CustomWare team members were located in Sydney and California.

The Voice of the Customer

Manoj Sinha, Office of Strategy & Planning, Cisco Services

"I would definitely recommend their services! They are a bunch of highly professional, creative and (above all) technically proficient guys. It was simply a pleasure working with them. Just concluded the first phase of a very challenging implementation for the largest group within Cisco..a one of its kind enterprise social networking wiki, integrated with a registration component for live and virtual events. The CW team executed as promised - exceeding all expectations!"

More information

For more information on how CustomWare can help streamline your next Atlassian implementation, please see our Atlassian Solutions page.

You can also read an article about the event in the financial times as twittered by the Cisco CTO