Webex Meetings: Building a Foundation for Collaboration

Heritage and Collaboration

Collaboration has always been a key part of Cisco’s heritage, and we’ve built our heritage on bringing together networking, security and management technologies and making them work seamlessly for our customers. With the latest release of Webex Meetings, we are building on that foundation even further with new enhancements.

Seamless Connections

Our customers dial into Webex to meet and communicate every day, and we’ve made this process simpler by rolling out early access to new short video addresses. Once enabled, you can now dial your meeting-ID@webex.com. This brings new simplicity to managing your video environments with a simplified dialing plan. As always, you can use the green Webex join button in your e-mail invitation to join from anywhere, at any time!

To learn more about how you can enable short video addresses for your organization, you can get started here.

Improving Networking and Security

We’ve also been focused on improving networking and security on the Webex platform. With this new release, we’ve made improvements to media performance in environments where TCP is used, this includes joining meetings from behind firewalls and web proxies. Users will now have access to higher resolutions and video frame rates in their video downlink.

As part of these improvements, we support falling back to TCP when UDP is not available. For administrators, we now use a single shared media port across Webex Meetings, Webex Teams and Webex devices. This also greatly simplifies the adoption of Webex Teams and enables administrators to manage quality of service (QoS) for users. This also helps avoid unnecessary traffic shaping where web proxies can slow down or impact quality in your meetings and ensures a great experience for your users.

Simplifying Meetings

Video is an integral part of the meetings experience driving face-to-face collaboration in Webex. Our customers have integrated video into their business processes in many ways, including live events, all hands meeting or team discussions.

There are times when participants in a video meeting might have distractions, such as an unwanted pet or guest. To make video meetings easier to manage, we’ve added the ability for hosts to turn off participant and panelist video devices to reduce distractions for meetings and events.

When joining meetings from Webex Teams, we’ve also made it even easier to manage your Personal Room. Adding to the ability to see upcoming meetings and viewing meeting participants, you can now manage your meeting lobby and admit outside participants.

We’ve put together a video with tips and tricks on managing your Webex personal room.

Watch it here:

Meet Any Time Any Place

Have you ever wished you were presenting from another location? How about in the woods, or by the beach? We’ve also added new support for virtual background on Apple iPad devices now, so you can join meetings and set your own virtual background image. We’ve even supplied a few for you to get started.

With a focus on making it easier to connect, we’ve simplified the way you join and conduct meetings with Webex. How is your organization planning to adopt these new technologies? Sound off below.