Cisco equipment

The “watchlist” area is for those items in the activity feed that are of special interest or importance to the user. Think of it like Twitter and Tweetdeck. In Twitter you get a feed of everyone you are following, but with Tweetdeck you can have separate columns for subjects of interest. In Quad’s case, the activity feed is everything from documents posted about things you follow, or activities, blogs, posts, etc. or people you follow.
The Watchlist allows the user to add and remove things from the list, and shows a trail of things that are happening related to a subject or activity. The user can search, and refine the search using parameters such as more recent activity, etc.
The second area is Myprofile, which is a profile, of course, but one that the user can add content to, including photos of what they are doing - once again, like you would do a mobile upload to Facebook. It also shows content such as the user’s latest blog (excluding restricted or private information). In addition there is a tag cloud area as well.  The person’s reporting structure within the organization is also available.
The third area is communities, which includes communities of interest, such as a product area they are involved or working in. It includes things like discussion forums, content (including videos), directory, etc. The search function allows the user to search on anything, and lets the user narrow down the search to groups, activities, etc. that are pertinent to their work life.
The last area is instant messaging, which allows the user to search in a directory, for someone in their group, area of interest or the company, see that person’s presence status, and then and instant message with them.
wholesale Cisco is only about 18 months into development of Quad (they launched in June 2010 and rolled it out to Cisco employees in November), and I’m pretty amazed at how useful the platform is. Cisco also has dozens of customers at various stages of development or deployment, as well as dozens of partners that they are working with on the Quad product.  Cisco offered partners a program enabling them to use Quad internally to determine if it is something that they would like to sell.
From a product perspective, used Cisco created an open platform, and added a mobility aspect. When Cius ships in May or June, Quad will ship as an application with the Cius device. Additionally, flexible deployment models are important to Cisco, so they are looking at all options including private cloud and public cloud deployments.
In summary, I think that Quad is fairly impressive. It is hard to convey how useful or visually appealing Quad is without seeing it in action. If you get a chance, take it.  I also like the fact that Cisco is developing Quad by learning from the company’s internal use of the product. After the initial launch, Cisco experienced a high user adoption rate, from which Cisco is continually learning. Cisco’s main goal is to learn from their experience and create a useful platform that combines social application and portals into a user experience platform.

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Cisco is taking strides to automate service provisioning, security and access control across mobile devices with a more integrated management suite that will eventually usurp the company's Wireless Control System (WCS) platform.

Cisco Prime Network Control System (NCS), scheduled to be available in June, is a Wi-Fi component of buy Cisco Prime for Enterprise, a set of integrated network management modules announced today that Cisco says converges user and access management of wired and wireless networks.

IN DEPTH: Cisco enterprise management tools take on new network realities

NCS will integrate what are currently separate interfaces for the WCS, Cisco Mobility Services Engine (MSE) location appliance, Cisco LAN Management System (LMS) and used Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC) appliance, says Greg Beach, director of product management in Cisco's wireless networking business unit.

The announcement comes about a month after Cisco competitor Aruba Networks announced that it, too, was smashing down wired and wireless management silos with its Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE) architecture.

Cisco's Beach describes NCS as an "evolution of WCS. We're moving from box management to focusing on end points and [having] one inventory for wired and wireless clients," he says.

That said, however, the company's new Identity Services Engine (ISE), intended to allow centralized, cross-domain policy setting and enforcement, remains a separate platform from NCS, he acknowledges.

Beach describes NCS as being focused on endpoint visibility and troubleshooting to get users back on line as soon as possible. Policy setting and configuration, however, require a separate log-on to the ISE, he says. ISE collapses access control and network admission control (NAC) functions.

NCS will cost $14,995 plus licensing, and the ISE will be $9,900 plus licensing based on number of end points, Beach says.