Video Conferencing Team Collaboration Collaboration Devices Engineering

Webex Meetings update: Deep integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams, Smarter background noise detection and suppression, and much, much, more…

Dec 11, 2019 — Connie Tang

You’ve probably heard us talk about building bridges, not islands. With this month’s Webex Meetings updates, you’ll see that we’ve done a lot to bring the power of Webex Meetings into the tools that you regularly use – like Slack, Microsoft Teams, iOS and Samsung devices, IBM Video Cloud, and more. These integrations, along with other features, will make your Webex Meetings experience more delightful, wherever and however you choose to have a meeting. And of course, simplicity of experience is always our top priority!

Checkout innovative updates with Webex Meetings:

1. Webex Meetings integrations with Microsoft Teams lets you have a great meeting experience from within a Microsoft Teams channel – from scheduling to joining and recording. When users schedule a meeting, all channel members are invited and become notified of the meeting. All end-of-meeting and recording notifications will also be posted in the channel in real-time. This is pending availability of the new MS Teams app in the Webex App Hub.
2. We recently shared integrations that let you experience the whole Webex Meetings lifecycle within Slack. These further improve your meeting experience from within a channel with features such as user status updates, list recordings for hosts, meeting reminders support, and the ability to launch a Personal Room via a dedicated call button.
3. Smarter background noise detection and suppression gives you a better audio experience. Webex reduces background noises coming from room video systems while minimizing voice suppression. The balance of these new features allows speech volume to be preserved during noise suppression.
4. Easily move your Webex meeting from your phone to desktop with Samsung’s DeX dual-screen support. We recently did a demo of Webex Meetings working on a DeX display at the Samsung Developer Conference. Samsung mobile users can switch between mobile or external monitors while in Samsung DeX Dual Mode and then share their screen to a monitor via HDMI cable. This creates seamless ongoing Webex meeting transitions. One more feature: You can also use Samsung’s Bixby voice commands to join a Webex meeting.
5. Share your own video and rear-facing video with dual-camera support on the Webex Meetings Mobile app for iPhones and iPads. With the dual-camera feature, you don’t have to choose between front OR rear cameras. For example, you can have a video call with an expert to troubleshoot a problem at a remote site – like a manufacturing site – and then send your video and the remote site video with the expert in the same video panel. This feature is unique to Cisco.
6. Livestream Webex Meetings: You can already live stream a Webex meeting to Facebook, which is a business-to-consumer solution. We’ve recently added the ability to more options to live stream to an enterprise audience. Webex Meetings’ recent integration with vBrick Rev and IBM Cloud Video means you have two additional channels to live stream Webex Meetings for large enterprise audiences, corporate townhalls, webcasts, and training, etc. This feature is currently in beta.
7. Recover your video conference quality more quickly after network congestion and packet loss. Network conditions will not always be ideal. We have enhanced our algorithms so that whenever there is network degradation, Webex Meetings will quickly recover from latency and packet loss within a few seconds to maintain a smooth video experience.
8. Improved user upgrade experience by decoupling the Webex Meetings desktop app from productivity tool plug-ins like Microsoft Outlook/Office and IBM Lotus Notes. Mac users who do not have administrative rights can now have Webex Meetings desktop app automatically updated. Transitioning to the O365 add-in requires the Outlook plug-in to be uninstalled, so decoupling allows Outlook plug-in to be uninstalled with no impact to the Webex Desktop App.
9. Share pictures from the local device file system into Webex Meetings from Android devices. When presenting from your mobile device, you can share photos from your device’s file system and even annotate it on the photos.

10. Take a shortcut into your personal meeting room: Introduced in October, Webex.new is now officially supported with a quick and easy way to get into your Personal Room– right from the browser. Letsmeet.new and mymeet.new will also get you there.