Cisco launches Project Squared collaboration app

The project is equipped with a security system that provides end-to-end content encryption on the Web, the company says.

The US-based network, headwear and software provider said the new product was compatible with devices ranging from smartphones to personal computers. It instantly syncs across devices.

Cisco has teamed up with Box, a storage and collaboration app, to include product integration and to make it easier to share and open content directly from within the Project Squared app without any downloading requirement.

Another promise is that the Project Squared app can greatly reduce incoming e-mail. Rowan Trollope, a senior vice president at Cisco, has cut his e-mail from about 2,500-3,000 messages in September last year, when the project was launched for Cisco’s internal use, to around 300 last month, since most of his meetings, work and documents are already on the application. 

The app is not meant to replace the Cisco WebEx, the company’s Web conferencing tool, but “to make it better”.

The new WebEx version and Box along with other apps such as Microsoft calendars, Outlook Exchange, Active Directory and most other single-sign-on applications are also compatible with this new app, and Cisco is working on partnering up with other cloud apps in the future. 

“The big ‘aha’ moment for us was that when you look at most successful collaboration tools through history, they all take something physical and virtualise it, and the virtualised versions of everything inside the conference room are now in your computer today, except for one, the room itself … and the room is an incredibly powerful metaphor for a new collaboration tool, and that is the collaboration tool that we call Project Squared,” Trollope, also general manager of Cisco’s collaboration technology group, said at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles on Monday.

Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president and chief technology officer for cloud collaboration, said Project Squared was not meant to compete with other social apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp because it focuses on the team collaboration space by helping people get their job into one room so that they can work together in real-time and non-real-time collaboration.

Project Squared delivers enterprise information-technology security through the Cisco Collaboration Cloud Platform, which provides end-to-end content encryption on the Web, where messages and content are encrypted as they are shared and unencrypted upon delivery to the recipient simultaneously.

“Every message and input [are] fully encrypted at the client side, so when it travels through our cloud, we cannot read it, and there is a separate key management server that could be stored at a different location to ensure the privacy of your documents in the cloud,” said Jens Meggers, vice president and general manager of Cisco cloud collaboration.

Cisco also unveiled the Cisco TelePresence IX5000 series – a three-screen technology that allows workers to videoconference with six to 18 people with half the bandwidth – at H.265 compression – of previous and competitive three-screen systems. 

It requires less power than a hair dryer at under 10 amperes. Its 70-inch screens are also equipped with three 4K cameras, an industry first, which seamlessly capture the entire room at ultra-high definition while multiple presentation sources can be viewed simultaneously when placed on any of the screens.