Inspire Your Team to Create in any Space: Introducing the Cisco Webex Board 85

Arne Nordheim, CEO IBM Norway, says they were “looking at ways to how we can enable collaboration and accelerate it” when they added Cisco Webex Boards to their small meeting rooms and huddle spaces. The team noticed a change immediately. According to Ida Furnes Breivik, IBM’s Client Center Manager, “We share thoughts, we don’t sit anymore. We stand up together. Our employees have the flexibility they need.”

The Webex Board is our fastest growing integrated product line. To give you even more flexibility, we are introducing the Webex Board 85. The Webex Board 85 joins the Board 70 (70” screen) and the Board 55 (55” screen) for a range of Board sizes to fit any size meeting room or huddle space. Its 85” screen provides an extra-large canvas for inspired collaboration using the Board’s white board and annotation tools, and a brilliant video conferencing experience. It’s perfect for open team rooms, training rooms, education halls, and anywhere a larger team wants to create together.

Innovating on the Experience

The Board 85 takes advantage of our merging of the software platform from Board OS and Room OS across the platform. What this means is that you can now experience the deployment, management, and features available on the Cisco Webex Room Series, such as one-button-to-push dialing, hybrid phone book, and people count.

Whiteboarding has been taken to the next level with:

• Pinch and zoom: Pinch the screen to zoom (3x) in on your whiteboard or annotations to take a closer look at drawings and notes. Just hold two fingers down and swipe to move the image.
• Add color: A new toolbar for whiteboarding and mark-up has been updated with more colors and an “undo” button.

The Boards are cloud-connected so we are constantly delivering innovations. You can expect some really cool features to be added to your Boards in the coming months:

• Stickies: Paste colorful notes on your whiteboard drawings and annotations.
• Extended canvas: Whiteboard beyond the physical limits of the Webex Board, extending the writable surface as much as needed.
• Email whiteboard: The Boards work with Webex Teams to automatically share whiteboards and annotations with the team. Now you can also share whiteboards via email with those not using Webex.
• Whiteboard as content: Share live whiteboard drawings or annotations to other video devices and the Webex Meetings app. Techies know this as whiteboard transcoding.

Don’t Overlook the Importance of Packaging

At our launch event at Cisco’s Partner Summit last week, people were telling me how impressive an 85” screen is for whiteboarding and drawing. What they didn’t see is how impressive it is to move the Board.

Our design imperative is to make things easy. An 85” touch panel display is massive. The team took this as a challenge, and created a breakthrough in design: a wheel-based transport frame that also facilitates ease in mounting. With wheels on three sides of the aluminum frame, the 220-pound Board 85 can be easily wheeled through any standard doorway and into a standard elevator – no freight elevator required.

The frame design also enables installers to easily lift the Board 85 into position onto the chosen mounting option and unclip the frame with with a standard screw driver. No special skills, no special equipment, no special access, just simple easy and quick installation. This is in contrast to competitors who have required cranes, forklifts, and special access to move their products into place.

It’s a small detail, but the Board 85 comes with a utility bag that doubles as simple moving instructions and storage for the frame assembly for future moves. Our designers think of everything.

Learn more about the Webex Board 85 and the full line of Boards. See What is a Huddle Space?