Cisco announced today that collaboration tools vendor Versly.com is now part of its ever-growing family. Versly hasn’t yet had a real product, but you can apply for a chance to be in its closed beta on their site.
Versly’s ten employees will be integrated into Cisco Collaboration Software Group that also includes its WebEx, Jabber and Quad product lines. It will be offered as a separate service, but Cisco will eventually integrate its features into these three existing services designed for enterprise customers, perhaps as early as 2012. So comment streams, detecting whether someone is actually inside a document at any given moment, and jointly editing documents will all be parts of Cisco’s collaboration tools eventually.
Versly integrates collaboration capabilities via a plug-in into Microsoft
Office. This isn’t unique, and there are a number of collaboration plug-ins for Office such as Jive Software’s purchase of OffiSync, Google has had Cloud Connect for a couple of years now, and independent vendor Cemaphore’s MailShadow, all reviewed in these links here.
