What's new in Webex: February 2021

On By Webex Team8 Min Read
What's new in Webex- February 2021

New features and capabilities to enable a more inclusive way of working

Welcome to what’s new in Webex! This article highlights new Webex features and capabilities that we have recently introduced and those coming in February.

This month we’re highlighting key features for users and IT admins.

For users, we’re introducing more features that help turn talk into action, plus expanded options that help you setup Webex features to match your workstyle preferences.

For IT administrators we’re introducing new real-time analytics to help you spot key trends for usage and adoption, quality and performance, and usage and engagement trends.

Read more below for information about these capabilities and more.

MEETINGS

MESSAGING

CALLING

DEVICES

INTEGRATIONS AND INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS

CONTROL HUB, SECURITY AND EDGE SERVICES

MEETINGS

Turn talk into action: Post meeting summary notification

Looking for a quick view of your meeting results?  Webex Assistant is standing by to help you quickly summarize your meeting and get the team engaged with highlights and action items.

When meeting assets are produced (recording, highlights) using the Webex Assistant, the meeting host is presented with a pop-up window immediately after the meeting ends. The popup contains a summary of the meeting (number of highlights, transcript, and recording, if any), and an option to quickly share the post-meeting assets to invitees with one click, or view more details about the post-meeting assets.

Note, if autoshare (a setting found under Preferences > Scheduling) is enabled, pop window would not be shown.

Post meeting hook_Webex Assistant@2x

MESSAGING

Simplify content sharing with OneDrive or SharePoint file access options for all space members

Easily share access to OneDrive or SharePoint online files with everyone in the space. No need enable individual access in OneDrive or SharePoint.

CALLING

Webex delivers a complete business phone system, powered from the cloud.  New features are added each month to allow users get the best calling experience.

Below, we’ve indicated which calling service each new feature applies to. If you’re not sure what calling service you have, see Webex | Find Out What Calling Service You Have.

Expanded calling features allow you to align to your workstyle preferences.

Manage call distractions: Set your preferences to mute or decline call notifications when in meetings.

Reduce distractions when you’re in a call or meeting. You can mute notifications for incoming calls so that you don’t see or hear someone calling you. If you have voicemail set up, they can leave you a message and you can return important calls later. The call still shows up in your spaces list and your call history.

Manage call history view:  Delete one, multiple or all call entries in right click menu of call history. After you’ve returned a missed call, you can delete the call from your call history. We’re also helping you reduce clutter by implementing a limit so that your call history only shows the last 200 calls over the last 30 days.

Auto answer tone notification for Agents

Optimize contact center agent experiences with auto answer tone notification. When contact center agents have their phone line set to auto-answer, you’re automatically connected to incoming calls. When you hear a tone (zip tone), you’ll know that you’re connected to a new call and that a customer is listening. The Webex app, powered by UCM call control, will play a zip tone to let agents know when an incoming call is connected.  Supported on Windows and Mac.

Administrators can get more information about automatic answering in the Deployment Guide for Calling in Webex (Unified CM).

Mobile audio enhancements for Webex

Mobile audio enhancements for Music Mode (original audio) and to remove background noise distraction

Webex app for mobile now supports consistent experiences across desktop and mobile modes.

  • Background noise removal: Worried about background noise in your call or meeting?  Don’t be. Join your meetings and calls without worrying about noisy keyboards, doorbells, or online learning happening in the next room.  Now on mobile, users can pick up phone calls while in busy environments and not worry about competing background noise.
  • Music mode – new mobile app options. Want to play music during your meeting or call? Music mode preserves your microphone’s original sound when using your computer for audio, making virtual concerts or music lessons even better.

Park and retrieve your phone calls

Call park and retrieve is now supported across all Webex cloud calling options (Webex app, Webex Calling service, Webex w/UCM).

In retail stores or service shops, customer calls often need to be moved between different departments or groups. Users can park a customer call on a designated extension number, then announce the extension number via intercom for help. Other users can retrieve the call by simply dialing the parked extension number on any other phones.

Park and retrieve your phone calls

DEVICES

Webex continues to add features to enable common app and device experiences to support more hybrid work scenarios.

Shape recognition in whiteboards

Tidy up your drawings on the Webex Board.  Your freehand squiggles can now be turned into perfect common shapes automatically, with shape recognition on the Webex Board.

Webex Board

Layout Selection on Webex Board

New to the Webex Board – Get the same experience as our other Webex room devices and choose the layout that makes sense for your meeting – including Grid View, Active speaker and more.

Layout selection on Webex board

 

Managing roles and mute controls during a meeting from your Webex device.

Request Mute/Unmute

Streamline meeting house-keeping items. The meeting host can send a request to a muted participant to unmute without having to say it in front of everyone in the meeting.

Change in-meeting roles from your device       

Late for your next meeting, but the team is still deep in discussion? Now you can change in-meeting roles from your Webex device. This feature allows you to make someone else the host of your meeting directly from a Webex Room system. This way you can leave the meeting without ending it for everyone, as someone else will take over your role as the host.

Improved share flow for Desk Pro

Webex Desk Pro now has a new, improved sharing experience. The new, simpler user experience makes it even easier to quickly share the content you want on your calls.

Webex Multi-Content Solution

Gathering the right expertise, at the right time, and in the same room can be hard. With the Webex mulit-content solution for video devices, you can gather different remote experts to work together as an integrated team. By dynamically sharing content in high-quality whilst still maintaining a video-first experience, the speed and precision of decision-making increases.

Display content from up to four different sources in your meetings with this powerful solution powered by the Webex Room Kit Pro and Cisco Meeting Server.  Perfect for connecting remote experts who need to make decisions quickly, while analyzing data from multiple sources. For example, the Webex multi-content solution for Healthcare is helping remote specialist providers to reduce time to diagnose cancers, improving patient outcomes and reducing stress and uncertainty for families.

Webex Multi-Content Solution

INTEGRATIONS AND INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS

Pager Duty Bot

Quickly triage business-critical incidents with your team on Webex via PagerDuty Bot. Unlock the ability to create, acknowledge, and resolve PagerDuty incidents directly in a space. You can automatically generate a focused incident space to ensure everyone stays up to date with incident statuses and progress.

 

Outlook Alert

Stay on top of your inbox with notifications in Webex from the Outlook Alerts for Microsoft Office 365 bot. With this update you’ll be able to receive notifications for important emails and outlook calendar invitations. You can set up rules to receive emails in Webex, maybe emails from a specific customer or emails with a particular subject. Create a Webex space for each customer where you and your team can focus on responding to them. The Outlook Alerts bot does it all! Check it out here.

Twitter Bot

Subscribe to tweets from those you follow at the click of a button and receive updates in a Webex space

Twitter Bot

CONTROL HUB, SECURITY AND EDGE SERVICES

If you are an admin, Webex Control Hub places management, monitoring, troubleshooting, analytics, edge and hybrid services across all your collaboration resources in one pane of glass.

Webex Meeting Quality Realtime Analytics

Webex Control Hub can pinpoint quality issues, self diagnose adoption challenges, and help IT take actions to improve the user experience.

Redesigned data analytics in Webex Control Hub bring what’s most important for IT front and center with real-time analytics that are refreshed every ten minutes.

  • Meeting Quality Analytics Page
  • Meeting Engagement Analytics Page
  • Meeting Participants Analytics Page
  • Meeting Audio Analytics Page

Watch the video unboxing of this new analytics dashboard or view the infographic for more detail:

Webex Calling: Localized experience for user management and announcements

Is your global team multilingual?  Now Webex Calling allows customer administrators to set the language availability for announcements.  Auto attendant, call queues, voice portal, and individual voicemail prompts will now support announcement updates in new languages.  Use Webex Control Hub to localize end-user calling announcements for a more inclusive collaboration experience.

 

Webex Emergency Calling admin options

Support for Cisco Emergency Responder (CER)

Calling in Webex (UCM): Emergency Calling Enhancements provide greater flexibility for large locations and extension only users.

Users automatically share their location in the case of an emergency.  IT administrators can enable location monitoring for users and their emergency services from Webex (for example, 911).  Call location is automatically shared with emergency responders. Supported for user apps across Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android.

 

Webex Calling: Emergency call back number assignment:

Configure Emergency Call Back Number (ECBN) and therefore the Emergency Service Address (ESA) independently from the Outgoing CLID configuration.

 

Calling in Webex (UCM): Webex support for Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST)

Create more options to ensure your users can make outbound calls even when their local site loses connection to your Cisco Unified Communication Manager call control.

Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) provides Unified CM with fallback support for Webex users. Cisco Unified SRST enables routers to provide call-handling support for Webex apps when they lose connection to remote primary, secondary, or tertiary Cisco Unified CM installations or when the WAN connection is down.

For more information on all of these features and upcoming updates to Webex, please visit the What’s New Articles for Webex Services

Resources

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About The Author

Webex Team
Webex is a leading provider of cloud-based collaboration solutions which includes video meetings, calling, messaging, events, customer experience solutions like contact center, and purpose-built collaboration devices..
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