Categories: Collaboration Devices Team Collaboration Video Conferencing

What’s new in Webex: November 2020

Welcome to what’s new in Webex! This article highlights new Webex features and capabilities that we have recently introduced, as well as a preview of new features coming in November and later this fall.

MEETINGS

WEBEX TEAM COLLABORATION

CALLING

DEVICES

INTEGRATIONS AND INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS

CONTROL HUB, SECURITY AND EDGE SERVICES

MEETINGS

Remove Background Noise from Meetings and Events – Windows and Mac

Having drywall put up in another room or a dog barking to go outside? Filter out those noisy background disruptions before (or during) a call so that others only hear your voice. Just turn on the Remove background noise setting and you’re all set. Find this feature at Settings > Remove background noise.

Work your way: Introducing the Dark Theme

Reduce eye strain by choosing a theme that works best with your lighting conditions. Webex is expanding dark and light theme choices available for the team collaboration to meetings.  Now you can now choose whether you want to view the meeting window in the standard Light Theme or the new Dark Theme. You can select your preferred option from the View menu.

Automatic in-meeting mute warning

Whoops, don’t share your great idea while on mute.  We’ve been making a lot of enhancements to mute and unmute functionality in Webex to remove some of the common friction points in meetings. Soon, automatic notifications in Webex Meetings and Webex Events will let you know if you’re trying to speak while on mute. If you start to talk while your microphone is muted, Webex will automatically show you a notification so that you can unmute yourself to speak.

WEBEX TEAM COLLABORATION

We’re adding more intelligence to enhance team collaboration. Use BOTs to automate your workflows and provide proactive notifications.

Microsoft Outlook Bot

We’re making it easy to transition from traditional email to team collaboration.  Don’t miss an important email while you are working in Webex.  Now you can get alerts within your team spaces of email from your client, boss or related to key projects.  Use notification rules for important subjects and people.  No need to create separate rules within Outlook – use an adaptive card within Webex space.

Confluence Cloud Bot—Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android

Get notified of important updates to Pages and Blogs in Confluence within your team workspace.   We’re making it easy to keep on top of changes to documented processes, release plans, or product requirement pages from Confluence.   Now you can quickly get updates for pages recently updated, watched, and even saved for later.

Leave a comment to a change on a page directly from any Webex space

Birthday Bot—Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android

Celebrate your teammates and get in a party mood.  We’ve created a super easy way to keep track of and celebrate birthdays within your team with a new Birthday Bot! Once available, you’ll find it on the Webex App Hub.

CALLING

Webex Calling

Remove Background Noise

Continue communicating without noisy background disruptions. Filter out those noisy background disruptions during calls using the Webex app so that others only hear your voice.

You will soon be able to select a setting option to remove background noise.  Just as in the Webex Meeting experience, when the Remove Background Noise setting is selected, the unified Webex app will remove leaf blowers, vacuum, and other background noise, while enhancing your voice. This feature will be available in November.

Call queue availability

Business agents who are members of a Call Queue can set their availability to receive calls in order to make call routing more effective.  This feature makes working from home easier for the end user when you do not have a hard phone. Users can set their availability from the Webex desktop or mobile client call settings page.

Update your contacts list from call history

We’re making it easy to add or edit your contacts, not only from Chat, but also from your call history.  Now you can right-click an entry in your Call History and have several convenient options at your fingertips. You can call the person back, add the person to your Contacts list, send a message, send an email, or even start a meeting.

DEVICES

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

Remove Background Noise

Continue communicating without noisy background disruptions. Later this month, Webex RoomOS devices (Desk Pro, Board and Room Series) will support advanced AI to remove background noise and enhance human voice.

Mute Controls

New expanded roster view & mute experiences create more consistent experiences across app and device meeting experiences. Hosts and co-hosts now have more control over the audio in Webex Meetings directly from their Webex device.  New features include: Mute and unmute everyone, enable “Mute on entry” (all users are automatically muted when they join), and control if meeting participants can unmute, or if only hosts can control who is unmuted.

 

INTEGRATIONS AND INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS

Expanded Webex Expert on Demand features

Webex Expert on Demand lets frontline workers collaborate hands free with subject matter expert anywhere to be more effective. Webex Expert on Demand integration with RealWear HMT-1 continues to expand features. With the Expert on Demand 1.7 release in November, frontline workers will have: expanded group call features to show active calls or initiate group call, search and select space to place or join calls, advanced camera controls to adjust contrast and exposure as well as take HD resolution photos, enhanced shared content controls to zoom in on content, simplified login options via a companion app with QR code and expanded language support with the addition of Korean, Thai, German, French, Polish and Russian.

Public Sector Options:  Legislate for Webex

Legislate for Webex is a purpose-built, complete collaboration solution that enables legislatures to vote and conduct hearings virtually, just as they would in personLegislate for Webex is built and secured on the global Webex platform to enable high availability and reliability for institutions around the globe, and is customizable to meet the needs of federal, state and local organizations.

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.

Support for Azure Conditional Access to Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online – Windows, Mac

If your organization uses Azure Conditional Access, you can now extend access to users to sign into Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online content management from within Webex Teams across Windows and Mac devices.  Uses Proof of Possession API to verify device in windows to seamlessly authenticate and use ECM-MS functionality.

Expanded VDI Support

Webex is offering best in class VDI support for collaboration. Webex supports full featured collaboration and advanced features across meetings, calling, team collaboration and content sharing.  Media is optimized to support 720p video and eliminate content hair-pining.  Additionally, expanded experiences such as virtual background, video breakout rooms and Webex Meeting Assistant are supported in VDI clients so users get richer collaboration experiences even in virtual desktop environments.  Meetings app platform support will be expanded in November to include Citrix and Windows/Ubuntu/eLux Thin Client OS, VMware and Windows Thin Client OS.

Space Classification

Admins can now define Webex space labels based on data governance policies and enforce all users to classify the Webex team collaboration spaces they create by Public, Confidential, Highly Confidential, or Secret.  This prompts user awareness and compliance with data classification policies where sensitive and confidential content may be shared.  External access can also be restricted to spaces in adherence to your organizations Enterprise Data Classification policies via DLP controls.

Webex Edge Connect – PacketFabric option

Expanded private connectivity options to Webex for hybrid deployments now include PacketFabric. Webex Edge Connect service supports a dedicated private connection to the Cisco Webex Cloud; this option offers added reliability and security for those organizations who prefer not to use OTT connectivity at the edge. With hundreds of global locations, the PacketFabric option for Webex Edge Connect allows organizations to interconnect to Cisco Webex via their owned physical network port and managed virtual connections using a flexible subscription model to adjust bandwidth as needed.

New API options

Webex Control Hub now provides easier access to data via APIs for integrations, and automatic data access for quality data, aggregated trending data and detailed reports. Admins can now pull the data in Control Hub via APIs to integrate with other dashboards or use for further analysis.

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

Learn more

Explore the new Legislate for Webex experience

Webex for Government 

Legislate for Webex [Website]

Webex Innovation Keeps Governments Running Effectively and Securely From Anywhere

Join our live classes

What’s New in Webex Teams November Release

What’s New in Webex Meetings 40.12

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Webex Team

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