Welcome to what’s new in Webex! This article highlights new Webex features and capabilities that will be available in April.
In April we’re introducing expanded features and capabilities in Webex including custom layouts and seamless calling to Webex Meetings for continuous collaboration. We’re also introducing rich experiences for Webex desktop and room devices to help organizations in their safe return to the office.
Read more below for information about these capabilities and more.
MEETINGS
MESSAGING
CALLING IN WEBEX
DEVICES
INTEGRATIONS
CONTACT CENTER
CONTROL HUB, SECURITY AND EDGE SERVICES
MEETINGS
Custom layouts
Customize your view in Webex so you can focus on the people you want to see. Two new layout features in Webex let you customize your view and experience: use zoom in and out capabilities to adjust your grid view from 5×5 to 2×2, or anywhere in between, so you focus on the people you want to see. You can simply use the slider at the upper right corner and zoom in to see larger images or zoom all the way out and see as many people as possible.
The stage view feature lets you customize the stage, giving you more control over who and what you want to focus on simply by moving anyone from the filmstrip onto the stage.
Post-Meeting Summary
Play back your meeting recordings without leaving the app. Meeting recordings are now viewed directly within the Webex app and include your meeting transcripts. With the new post-meeting summary feature, these assets will now be automatically populated in a Webex space, beginning first with the meeting recording which streamlines how you access, view, and share recordings (and in the future, all meeting assets). As the meeting host, once you wrap up a meeting there are two places where you can access your recordings:
- In the space that you set up for your meeting, your recording will be accessible in the new ‘Recordings’ tab under the ‘Content’ tab.
- For recorded meetings from your Webex Personal Room, you go to the Calendar view to access your recording.
MESSAGING
Webex app on Linux
For the open-source community, we are pleased to announce that Webex is now bringing you messaging, meeting, and one-to-one calling for at work and educational settings. All the core Webex capabilities in a single app are supported to help you seamlessly collaborate. This is just the beginning; support for advanced calling and a full-featured meeting experience will be added in the upcoming releases.
New send button for messages
We’re making it more intuitive for new users to send messages. A new send button in the compose area gives clear indication on how to send messages (this is in addition to simply pressing Enter on the keyboard). We have also added instructions above the send button to show how to create a new line in your messages (Shift + Enter).
Video Playback Enhancement
Change how you view videos in your spaces. Video playback enhancements transforms how you access videos on the Webex mobile app. All videos are now clearly identifiable and easier than ever to start, pause and move to full screen all from within the app. We have also streamlined the process to forward videos to other contacts or spaces.
Optimize shared content, streamline pause and resume capabilities
Webex automatically optimizes your shared content for text, image, or video for better experience. When you share a video, you’ll no longer need to select a higher frame rate to share. Webex automatically determines the optimized settings for content share, selecting best frame rate and resolution for your content type.
Webex will also streamline content pause and share capabilities. Need to skip ahead a few slides or even jump to another presentation without stopping? In April, Webex will let you pause your share while you navigate to content you’d like to feature — participants continue to see the last shared slide until you resume the share. Changing slides or presentations occurs in the background, unseen by the participants and helps you present a smooth and flawless presentation. These features are also available in meetings.
CALLING IN WEBEX
Webex delivers business class calling from the cloud. New features are added each month to allow users get the best calling experience.
Seamless escalation of SIP calls to Webex Meetings
Webex enables continuous collaboration from a simple phone call. If you’re on a call, you can now elevate the call to a full-featured meeting with a few clicks of the keyboard without anyone going on hold. Invite additional attendees you’d like to join the discussion. They’ll receive a notification to join the meeting, and from there all participants can take advantage of AI transcriptions, real-time translations, notes and action items, and recordings. You can even move calls to a meeting when you’re talking to people outside your organization. Available on Unified Communication Manager in April and coming soon to Webex Calling.
Support SSO on mobile (UCM)
As a remote worker on a mobile device, users will have an improved user experience with single sign-on (SSO). The first time you enter the Webex app or when your login expires, you’ll enter a one-time username and password, and you are able to collaborate.
DEVICES
Control the Room USB camera via a remote control
Webex devices will automatically frame the person in front of the camera, but sometimes you want to focus on an object or a specific area of the room. Now you can manually control the camera on Room USB devices with a TRC6 remote control. You can use the remote control to pan, tilt and zoom the camera.
Web-app xAPI integrations
We are adding the open-source JavaScript XAPI library to the web engine on Webex devices. Users will now be able to improve and install UI Extensions and/or local web apps with access to JavaScript content. This opens new opportunities to create new scenarios and macro automatic to create richer web apps.
INTEGRATIONS
Work faster with Webex in Box
Need to collaborate live on a Box document? Start or schedule a Webex meeting or share content in a Webex space, without leaving Box. The new Webex integration with Box enables face-to-face communication and easy content sharing, so that you can focus on getting your job done faster. Check with your IT or Box Admin if you don’t see Share file with Webex in your Box account. (Available for Windows and Mac)
Share Box files on mobile on Webex
You can now share, preview, and view Box files from the Webex mobile app. (iPhone, iPad, and Android)
Appspace integration for digital signage
Appspace is now an official Cisco partner for digital signage and will be available as an integrated option in Webex Control Hub. Guide your teams and visitors on their return to the workplace. View the latest guidelines, business critical data, town halls, meeting space schedules, training content, and more. Tailor communications for conference rooms, huddle spaces, and in-home devices. These functionalities can now all be adapted and viewed within Webex Control Hub.
CONTACT CENTER
Webex Contact Center APIs
Offer customers tailored, specialized experiences powered by Cisco’s underlying video, audio and collaboration technologies.
In April, Webex Contact Center will provide API to support capabilities to:
· List and download media captures for your agent-customer interactions
· View statistics on your agents
· Get statistics for one or more queues
· See all open and closed tasks filtered by channel type, organization, or time frame
· Use AI APIs to convert speech to text and get AI insights from a conversation
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.
Workspace Location and Floorplan Summary
Managing collaboration resources in a hybrid work model can benefit from quick, easy, and straight to the point data. With workspace location and floor plan summaries, you can visualize your workspaces both geographically and locally in Webex Control Hub.
Real-time analytics: Calling and Messaging
In April, Webex Control Hub will include real-time analytics for messaging and calling expanding real-time analytics across the suite of services. Analytics are designed with a user-friendly layout with key performance metrics, contextual filtering, and faster load times.
Live Meetings World Map View
Webex Control Hub will present a geographical view that shows all live meetings and connected data centers. With this visual tool, IT Admin can easily identify live meetings with potential network quality issue and use advanced troubleshooting tools to proactively address.
Meeting Participants Map View
A geographical view of a single meeting and the connected data center offers details to quickly zero in on affected meetings using Webex Control Hub trouble shooting capabilities.
Historical Metrics API
IT Admins will be able to pull Webex calculated metrics for Messaging and Device services instead of having to calculate themselves. This allows admins to access metrics consistent with those used in downstream business apps by IT.
Manage security and compliance: Configure and enforce file size limit in Webex spaces
Enforce file size limits for file uploaded to Webex spaces to meet your compliance guidelines. Webex Control Hub allows organizations to configure the file size limit that can be supported by their downstream 3rd party compliance tools used for corporate data archiving.
Manage security and compliance policy: Admin can block users from joining external Webex meetings
Keep your conversations secure and internal with a simple Webex Control Hub setting. For industries, such as financial and public sector, where employees handle sensitive data, admins can configure settings, so users don’t have meetings external to their organizations. While many companies use firewalls and other complicated methods to achieve this, Webex gives admins the flexibility and simplicity of achieving this higher level of security with a simple turn of a knob in Control Hub.
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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