How To Ensure a Safe Return Back to The Office with Cisco Webex Rooms and Appspace

Transitioning back to the office is a concern for many organizations and their employees. Recommendations about masks, strict cleaning schedules, capacity limits, and social distancing measures need to be considered to ensure that the journey back into the office is a safe one.

Cisco and Appspace make it easy to create a clear “safe return to the office” strategy through digital signage and simple space management. Cisco Webex Rooms offer a collaboration device for every space and scenario. At the same time, Appspace delivers a comprehensive workplace experience platform – and together, they built a best-in-class communication and engagement standard. This allows you to deploy a consistent brand across your entire digital workplace, and provides a secure, cost-effective way of centralizing content delivery, and standardizing internal and external communications.

“In today’s rapidly changing environment, the power of the Cisco + Appspace platform is unmatched. It’s ease and simplicity allow organizations to communicate without borders all while leveraging investments in Webex Room devices and APIs.
Appspace’s unique integration with Webex Teams further extends these capabilities to allow you to communicate with confidence to your entire workforce and return to a safer working environment.” – Jim Koniecki – Principal Consultant – NTT

Lobby and Check-In Experiences

In the lobby, the Webex Share and Appspace work together to deliver critical and engaging content to your displays. Everything from safety messages and videos to live data from Cisco DNA Spaces informs office goers about building occupancy and what to expect throughout the space. What’s unique about the Webex Share is that it is a small, affordable device that allows you to effortlessly share content to any display – protecting your investments with other hard clients and helping you instantly transform any screen into a tech-enabled communications solution.

Cisco and Appspace create an easy-to-use kiosk experience on the Webex Desk Pro as well. Office guests can use the Desk Pro to check-in, and the Appspace visitor registration workflow takes pictures, provides NDA documents to sign, and notifies the individual expecting the guest that they have arrived. It can even connect with a badge printer and print an access badge or sticker for the guest. As we return to work, visitor management is a feature that many will need to adopt to control traffic flow in and out of their office spaces.

Meeting Room Experiences

Interested in posting reminders about cleaning touch devices or limiting a larger room to fewer participants? These integrations provide multiple opportunities for digital signage, custom layouts, and messages, all customizable to your needs. You can also keep your teams informed by displaying a live COVID-19 dashboard with information from the World Health Organization (WHO) or trigger an Emergency Alert for an event that requires attention.

These displays can also be used with Appspace to live stream video such as company town hall meetings. Further, when not being used for active meetings or streams, training content can be uploaded and displayed right on the device. This helps increase user adoption and technology training in the workplace, ensuring that all employees can use the resources in the room.

Enterprise Messaging Integration, the Appspace Content Portal, and Workplace Displays

Beyond workplace displays, it is still critical to keep everyone informed about important company news and safety information. Regardless of where they are – whether it is at work, at home, or on the go, using a touch-based device, such as the Cisco Webex Board or Desk Pro, employees can browse through shared channels using the touch interface in the all-new Appspace content portal. The portal allows users to access reports, videos, safety messages, presentations, workplace services information, and much more, creating an “always connected” experience. Employees can choose to browse the content that is the most relevant to them, and you’ll be able to distribute that content to individuals based on department, role, or any groupings that you choose. This experience also extends to the home office, where employees can browse channels on their personal devices and collaboration endpoints. When these devices are in the half-wake mode, they can display essential messages via digital signage, including data visualizations, safety updates, and emergency alerts.

Taking your content further, Appspace now integrates with enterprise messaging apps, including Webex Teams. Post content as you usually would to workplace displays, and it appears perfectly formatted in the Teams spaces you choose. Using pre-designed templates, creating content is a breeze, and stays perfectly formatted and on brand regardless of the display size or location. This workflow allows you to send critical communications to your team via a platform they use daily and can check anywhere.

“The user interface, coupled with the ability to leverage communication within our newly deployed Webex environment, made Appspace a very attractive option to assist in our corporate communications. Streamlined and consistent communication channels that deploy to the assortment of devices we have out there is cost-effective as we grow the number of devices out in the enterprise. We can also bring more departments onto the platform due to the friendly content creation experience.” –Dan Van Roekel, Sanford Health.

If you want to learn more about ensuring a safe journey back into the office, sign up for our upcoming webinar, Safely Return to The Office with Webex Rooms, on August 18^th, 2020.

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