June update of team collaboration tool, Webex Teams
Sit back and enjoy the ride with our Webex Teams June update. There is so much happening this month within our team collaboration tool…
Threading – chat within a chat!
It’s here! With our June update comes the highly anticipated Threading feature. We understand that sometimes context can be lost within a space with a lot of participants, especially if the message relevant to you was sent hours ago. Now, it will be possible to reply directly to someone’s message, no matter where or when it was sent in a space.
Replies in threaded messages are composed similarly to normal messages, you can include rich text formatting, emojis, and GIFs. These replies are written in an overlay which appears when you click ‘reply to thread’. Take a look at what’s coming below:
Unified Communications Manager in Webex Teams
In March of this year, we saw some Unified CM features appear in Webex Teams in preview-only. This month, the integration is complete, and Cisco Unified Communication Manager native Webex Teams registration will be made available to all, allowing you to seamlessly re-use your existing infrastructure to link your Webex Teams to your work phone. This means you will be able to use Webex Teams to call people inside or outside of the organization using their phone (or mobile) numbers.
Numbers can be input directly into the desktop app using the keypad. This means you can put calls on hold, merge, or transfer calls without needing to leave the app.
Now, your team can use Teams to order that Friday pizza!
Cognitive Collaboration is here!
We are all very excited to announce the release of People Insights in Webex Teams. People Insights allows you to see relevant and useful information about people before you meet them. Without leaving Webex Teams, you can get an insight into who this person is professionally, where they are based, and much more. Having this information at your fingertips allows you to collaborate more effectively when you meet someone for the very first time, thus allowing you to builda better relationship right from the beginning.
To access People Insights in Webex Teams, you hover over some’s avatar or name to bring up their contact card. The contact card will have an extra option now, right next to ‘Message’ and ‘Call’, which will allow to you view a user’s ‘People Insights Profile’.
People Insights only displays publicly available information in these profiles, similar to what can be found with a quick search engine result for a person’s name. If you’re meeting someone from your own company for the first time, you’ll get lots of additional information like their title, contact info and reporting structure.
See Your Favorites First
Get to those important spaces faster! We’ve split out our space list view to place your ‘Favorite’ spaces at the top of the list, while the others will appear below. This will allow you to see at a glance if there are any unread messages in these favorite spaces. Please note that this feature is off by default and can be enabled through your app settings!
Introducing On-Premise Webex Devices
‘On-Premises’ and ‘Cloud’ are confusing words which we hear thrown around way too often nowadays. Why does it matter if my device is On-Prem/Cloud? I just want to join the meeting on the big screen! Now, we’ve made it easier for you do just that, without having to worry about how everything is connected.
We’ve been able to use cloud-registered Webex devices along with Webex Teams, and now you can automatically connect to on-prem Webex Devices in the same way, using the same Wi-Fi network.
Connect, wirelessly share content, and use the device to join meetings quickly and seamlessly. You can share content and control the device microphone during the meeting.
To see info about how to set this up in your organisation, see Allow Users to Connect to On-Prem Devices.
Emoji Support on Windows 7
It’s time to turn that frown upside-down 😊. Our Windows 7 app now has access to a new emoji library allowing those users to have a similar great messaging experience to our Mac and Windows 10 users.
Even Smarter Presence
If someone’s status shows as inactive in Webex Teams, it is possible they could still be at their computer, just not in the application itself. With this improvement to presence, users will be active in the application as long as they are active on their computer. We’ve also brought some additional fields to our DND status menu allowing you to be more specific as to how much quiet time you need.
We’ve Redesigned our Mobile App
Our teams have been working hard on redesigning out iPhone, iPad and Android apps, so that they share a common code with our desktop apps. What this means is that we will be able to:
- Release more features for both desktop and mobile at the same time
- Create mobile-specific features that let us take advantage of the power of the platform!
You’ll be able to see a lot of these benefits already with some of the new features being released this month, such as threaded messages and appearance themes.
Microsoft Cloud App Security
With Microsoft’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) you can gain greater visibility and control across user and admin activities, as well as files in Cisco WebEx Teams. This feature is now in Public Beta.
It enables you to create policies to identify sensitive files and risky activities, so that you get alerted when policies are violated, and automatically apply controls and actions, such as deleting messages that contain sensitive files. These CASB capabilities can be implemented via an API connector.
Analytics and Diagnostics improvements
We’ve added support for Webex Share devices in the Device utilization page and also utilization tracking for the new Digital Signage capability.
For IT Administrators in charge of troubleshooting Webex meetings, now, you can search for these meetings based on Participant email as well as previously supported Host email, Meeting ID and Conference ID.
Check out Webex Teams for free: https://www.webex.com/pricing/free-trial.html.
