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Cisco unveiled a new release of Cisco WebEx Social, an offering that enables users to participate in social collaboration regardless of where they are working by bringing social capabilities to the devices and applications they use most often.

With this release of WebEx Social, Cisco is introducing new capabilities such as integration with Microsoft Office, which allows workers to use Word, PowerPoint or Excel to jointly edit and post updated documents, presentations and spreadsheets back to WebEx Social.

Other new capabilities include enhanced e-mail integration, which lets workers stay in e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook while also creating and posting updates to WebEx Social; enhancements to the WebEx Social iPhone and iPad client that let workers transition from social networking to real-time instant messaging, Web conferencing and voice calls directly from their mobile application; new browser-based video calling, so users can seamlessly move to a high-definition video conferencing session without going to a separate application; and flexible deployment models, including on-premise (WebEx Social Server), partner-hosted (through Logicalis, ACS and Alphawest) and a Cisco-hosted cloud-based service.

"More than ever, companies are rethinking the way they have traditionally done business to take a more social approach,” Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Cloud Collaboration Technology Group, said in a statement.

With the announcement, Cisco is extending WebEx cloud services to not only encompass what was formerly known as Quad, but also Cisco Callway, its hosted TelePresence services. By bringing a more comprehensive solution to the cloud, Cisco says, it’s able to provide users with easier access to social collaboration tools of choice from any device.

WebEx Social Server will be availability worldwide in July and the cloud-based service will be available in North America in July.