The Weemo team is thrilled to be at The Big Social this week to witness the launch of the new Zimbra. We find the move out of VMWare to Telligent to be full of promise. Both teams have been working towards a common goal to transform the workplace into a more collaborative environment. It is interesting to note how they accomplished the transformation of the workplace in two very different fashions. Telligent relies on social tools while Zimbra is focused on email and calendar.
Collaboration: Email, Social, Video – A Three Piece Puzzle
When it comes to completing a task, humans have learned that joining forces enables teams to accomplish great goals. Sometimes technology can help by fostering collaboration between workers. This is especially true when the technology opens up new communication channels. When introduced into the workplace, email provides an efficient method for dealing with disparate time zones and delivering non-interruptive asynchronous communications, while social tools enable teams to build communities and organically multiply relationships.
Business relies on these two communication channels to serve different purposes. As Patrick Brandt, Zimbra’s CEO, mentioned in his blog entry following the acquisition of Zimbra:
“Telligent has always remained steadfast in our belief that social isn’t a replacement for email – it’s a complement to email”. Rob Howard, Founder and CTO of Zimbra continued Brandt’s theme during his keynote at The Big Social, that video chat is an important element of the new Zimbra unified social collaboration suite.
We share this belief at Weemo: email and social are two elements in the collaborative workspace puzzle. In addition to this, we share Howard’s belief that real-time video adds value to businesses when used alongside with email and social. Later Jon Dybik, VP Product discussed Zimbra’s commitment to expand on its use of HTML5 for web and mobile including the evolving standards of WebRTC.
Video Conferencing in the Cloud for Real-Time Collaboration
At Weemo, we believe that real-time video is about to become an essential piece of the collaborative business experience for each of us. In a similar fashion to how email and social positively impact the collaborative workspace, real-time video provides additive benefits to business users. The opportunity to communicate in real-time while seeing each other’s facial expressions humanizes digital communications. Real-Time Video enables an escalation from asynchronous to synchronous communication.
Real-time video has already been broadly adopted in consumer context (Skype) and more recently by brands seeking to strengthen the relation with their audience (Google Hangouts). Business users are also heavy users of video conferencing but the use of such tools remains outside of their business workflow (business applications, contact list, in context of mobility). The main reason is due to the evolution of standalone monolithic Unified Communications platforms which architecturally don’t support contextual integration into business applications.
At Weemo, we are committed to make real-time video in the business context as easy to use as sending an email. We abstracted the complexity of implementing and managing real-time video capabilities to provide our partners with a simple set of tools (APIs and applets) that allow them to deliver great real-time video experience within business users’ favorite applications.
Real-Time Video One Click Away From Your Zimbra email
To offer Zimbra users the opportunity to video chat in one-to-one or participate in a multi-party video conference, we developed the Weemo Video Chat Zimlet that you can download on the Zimbra Gallery and try for free. For Zimbra Service and Solutions Providers that would like to offer premium video chat feature to their customers, we have just launched our Partner Program. You can check our demo video in our product page and request your API Key by enrolling our Partner Program.
