Cisco invests in Xobni

According to the New York Times, Xobni has received a $7 million of funding from Cisco. This is Cisco's latest venture in to Web 2.0 tools, following Jabber, Postpath, and WebEx.

Collaboration is a key focus of this investment, both between companies and the software that Cisco has been investing in.

“Cisco and Xobni actually share a very similar vision of using collaboration,” said Sandhya Venkatachalam, director of corporate development at Cisco. They both “center the experience around the people one wants to communicate with.”

Read more here.

Adobe Launches New Collaboration Suite

The latest article on Read Write Web highlights Adobe’s latest launch of Acrobat.com, which is an online office suite that includes a word processor, a web conferencing app, an online file sharing system, file storage, and a PDF converter.

Buzzword, the word processing app allows for collaborators to be given different roles depending on their access levels. Employees can be given the role of an editor, reviewer, author, and reader. Users can even comment on articles.

Connect Now, like WebEx or Citrix is a web conferencing tool where live meetings can be done over the web via screen sharing. Participants can be assigned roles throughout the meeting, and those roles can also be easily changed.

Share is a collaboration tool that allows a user to share large files on the online office suite while still maintaining control of the document.

My Files is a document organizer which allows you to search files by author, date created, file type, last updated, and by alphabetical order.

Create PDF allows you to convert existing files to PDF documents. This is a trial version though that only allows you to convert five documents.

The launch of Adobe’s new online office suite is sure to give Google Apps a run of its money. Over time, which will be the enterprise favorite? I have my pick.