Improving the Mobile Meeting Experience

If you are like me, you’ve probably found yourself stuck in traffic on the way to the office with no chance of making it to your 8 a.m. meeting. But with WebEx, I can join the meeting on my way to work with a single tap of the big green button in my WebEx app.

My daily routine has me on the go a lot of the time. Like many of you, I need the flexibility to join, participate, and collaborate in meetings anywhere, on any device, including my mobile. Ideally, I want the meeting experience on my Android phone to be equally as effective as it is on my desktop or in a conference room. At Cisco, we’ve been working to bring the WebEx meeting features and functionality you’ve enjoyed on your desktop to smaller screen mobile devices — from before the meeting starts to when the content sharing begins.

We’ve made joining a meeting from your Android and iOS phone or tablet even easier. That big green button you know from your desktop is right on your smaller device’s interface. I love the ability to just click an icon on my phone screen to open my personal meeting room and go straight into my meeting. There’s no redirecting to a web page or launching another app required. iPhone X users can also use Touch ID or Face ID to automatically authenticate and join a meeting, eliminating the need to open the event details, or search through notes to find a meeting link.

There is also a call-back feature that comes in handy when you are in the car or for those times you need to be hands-free. You can setup WebEx to call you back automatically when connecting from your phone. WebEx also integrates with Siri to launch meetings or your WebEx Personal Room using commands like “Call my room using WebEx” or “Join my room using WebEx.” You can also use the “Call my next meeting” command to tell Siri to quickly join your next scheduled WebEx meeting.

Once in a meeting, the small screen view experience is even better than before. You can see everyone in the meeting with our new grid layout, which displays up to three participants, plus shared content view on both iOS and Android devices. We’ve optimized the video layouts so that whether you are in portrait or landscape mode you can set the right amount of device real estate to see the faces of attendees, react to ever-important non-verbal cues, and know who is engaged.

There are also more options for sharing content. In addition to sharing your screen, WebEx allows you to pull content from a variety of storage solutions including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, IBM Connections, Microsoft OneDrive, and your device’s photos storage.

Another really cool feature for Apple iOS users is the ability to share augmented reality files in your meeting. You can place, resize, and rotate a virtual object anywhere in your immediate physical area, such as a conference room desk or a factory floor. Then as a presenter, you can walk around the object, showing your attendees the virtual object in a real-time setting from all angles. This feature literally brings another dimension to the meeting experience.

We are really excited about putting these new mobile meeting enhancements at your fingertips and making it easier for you to plan, participate, and collaborate on your small-screen devices. I look forward to hearing from you on how these new features are helping you make your “on-the-go” meeting experience that much better.

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