Cisco Works to Perfect MeetingsCisco Works to Perfect Meetings

Cisco acquires Worklife, aims to automate and improve some of the more manual and boring tasks associated with meetings.

We are rapidly moving into a fully digitized world where everything is connected -- at least that's what we're told. So why is it that something as simple as a meeting is filled with disjointed processes? Call into this audio bridge, join that Web conference, ask Bill for the meeting notes he took, send a message to Mary to put her documents in Google Drive... but then you find out she's already put them in Dropbox. Frankly, it's amazing that we get any work done at all.

Improving this experience and delivering flawless meetings is something that the industry has been working toward. For example, earlier this year Microsoft announced Skype Meeting Rooms (formerly Project Rigel) to bring a unified Skype experience to meetings... assuming people want a Skype experience. (See also, "Join Legacy Video Gear to Skype for Business Online Meetings, Now!") Microsoft customers can now quickly start meetings without the hassle of needing to invoke multiple systems.

Despite the advancements in meeting room technology, however, there is still no silver bullet that delivers a truly flawless meeting. One could argue that meetings are now less flawed with respect to audio, video, and content sharing -- but that's just one aspect of meetings. Areas that still need more attention are managing content, files, and tasks. Cisco Spark, Slack, Unify Circuit and other products of that ilk have improved content management as users now have a single place for documents and notes related to specific workflows and projects. However, these tools vary quite widely and processes are still somewhat manual in nature.

This morning Cisco acquired Heroik Labs, which does business as Worklife, to automate and improve some of the more manual and boring tasks associated with meetings.

I'm sure at one time or another we have all worked with a super "Type A" person who's hyper-organized, takes great notes, hands them out before and after meetings, and keeps everyone on track. If you're lucky enough to work with someone like this, meetings may seem flawless because that person's DNA makes them so.

However, if you're a "normal" person like myself -- you're involved in too many projects with too many people, and you have a tendency to ad hoc stuff -- then you need better tools, like Worklife.

As one would expect, Worklife has a number of features to help people better prepare for meetings. The tool lets workers take a quick scan of the day or week, review their agenda, and catch up on relevant information. This improves the meeting experience because it gets everyone on the same page before the meeting starts. Without some kind of tool to do this, the first 15 minutes of every meeting is spent doing so, which is why so many meetings end late.

But wait, there's more, as they say on infomercials. Worklife also has features that help with the in-meeting experience. The real-time, shared note taking and task management ensures everyone leaves with the same content and understanding of next steps. The interface lets all participants take notes, add agenda items, complete tasks, etc., simultaneously. So Bill might put a note down to check in with customer A before sending out a proposal, and Mary might find the comment about needing to find three customer references important and jot that down. When this happens with traditional meeting tools, like with a pen and notebook, there are pockets of relevant information scattered all over the company. With Worklife, everyone sees all notes and who created them.

Also, there's a fully integrated, shared task manager/to-do list, so the team can jointly create a list of action items that is agreed upon by all before the meeting ends. Juxtapose this with the traditional, manual methodology of each person making his or her own list, which results in a "he said, she said" scenario in which things can often fall through the cracks.

Worklife seems to have a good understanding of just how bad most people are with meetings, as they have created a number of templates with a pre-built agenda and relevant tasks. Meeting types include weekly team, one-on-one, and project status meetings, among others.

The tool works with Microsoft Outlook and Google for email and calendar integration, as well as a number of other productivity tools such as Google Drive, Evernote, and Slack. There is no current integration with Cisco Spark, but I'm expecting to see that sooner than later. In the Cisco Blogs post on the acquisition, VP of Corporate Business Development Rob Salvagno indicates that Worklife will eventually become an integrated feature in Spark, which makes sense given Cisco is now all in with Spark.

Prior to Rowan Trollope's arrival, the Collaboration Business Unit at Cisco went through a period of sluggishness where it had lost its edge. Since then, the company has come roaring back partially due to a number of acquisitions including Acano, Tropo, Synata and now Worklife. Has it achieved its goal of making meetings flawless? Not yet, but they're now becoming less flawed, and that gives Rowan Trollope something to focus on moving forward.

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