There's more to great collaboration and communication than simply keeping people connected through chat apps and meeting tools. Today, business leaders rely on the data and insights generated from day-to-day conversations to make crucial decisions about their future. The only way to reliably capture that information is through note-taking services.
In the past, options like Cisco Spark Meeting Notes might have been a great way to do that - at least for Cisco users. However, now, Cisco has announced that they will be altogether discontinuing the Meeting Notes service. Though there's a chance that the solution will be rolled into the Webex Teams experience, no such announcement has been made so far.
In the wake of the Cisco Meeting Notes solution, I spoke to an alternative provider called Hugo. Hugo provides a connected meeting notes solution that integrates company meeting notes with the tools and applications teams use every day. CEO and co-founder, Josh Lowy, told me all about his thoughts regarding the loss of Cisco Meeting Notes, and how his team can help businesses that still need to access, share and action critical meeting information between teams.
Tell Us About Hugo
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Josh Lowy[/caption]
Josh Lowy and his co-founder created Hugo as a solution to help connect the way that people meet in an organisation, to the way that they work. Coming from a product management background, Lowy noticed how easy it was for information to get lost in many business environments. When teams are working across different locations and across different tools, like CRM systems, ticketing solutions, and even collaboration tools, access to the same decision-driving data becomes impossible.
Hugo helps to keep everyone in a business environment on the same page with a connected meeting notes solution. "With Hugo, you can centralise your meeting notes, and through integrations, connect that information to other essential people and tools in an organisation. You can send your notes to Slack for people who couldn't attend your latest meeting or create Jira tickets for the product team based on new information from customers."
According to Josh, Hugo supports companies in creating better customer satisfaction and employee productivity. Used in both external and internal interactions, Hugo pulls meeting data from different conversations into the same place to make workplaces more efficient.
"A lot of customers of ours have seen Spark Notes being neglected for some time now. They've come to us searching for a solution that they can no longer get from Cisco."
"Hugo works with all the SaaS solutions that teams are already using, so they can focus on workflow gains without the risk of vendor lock-in"
What's Your Response to Cisco Discontinuing Meeting Notes?
Lowy told me that at a strategic level, it looks as though Cisco is pouring more of their energy into competing with solutions like Microsoft Teams and Slack. They're focusing on their instant chat, file-sharing, and conferencing solutions, and paying less attention to the process of collecting meeting information.
