Cisco Spark free - worth a try

[Dieselboy]

I installed Cisco Spark when I was at Cisco Live Melbourne 2015. It used to be called a different name, and Cisco have enhanced it and re-released it as a new product. It's free - https://www.ciscospark.com

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/collaboration/cloud-collaboration/cisco-spark-faq-guide.pdf

I've recently picked it up again, and we're in the process of bringing it to our organisation to replace Cisco Jabber eventually, although not strictly like-for-like. The past week I've been using the free version to speak to family, coworkers and Cisco reps. Sending screen snips to groups of people, and the ability conference them irrespective of whether they are all in the same domain or not is very very handy.

The most interesting part is, think Cisco Webex but a messenger version. When you send someone a message it creates an ad-hoc room. The benefit here is that you can invite others to the conversation, they can say their bit then leave but the room is still maintained.

Bringing it to my org. is interesting - I will be using the hybrid services with another Cisco Expressway VM. Feels like Cisco used Jabber as a "discovery" exercise to find out challenges and requirements, and then started from scratch with spark.

BTW I'm watching training videos on collaboration and prompted me to post about spark here. I got thinking, with video conferencing systems, say roughly 3mbps for a single 1080p video stream, well some rooms have three screens of different streams. That's 9mbps.

What happens when this goes 4k resolution? (3mbps * 4 = 12, 12 *3 = 36mbps)!

if you want h.264 at 60fps, then it's 4.5mb for 1080p...

[deanwebb]

That middle bit of yours... "When you send someone a message it creates an ad-hoc room." THAT is genius stuff. WebEx without invites... I love it.

[Dieselboy]

Yep - big productivity benefits there.