Webex Share Just Got Better (Part 2)

Webex Share Just Got Better Blog Series

The Webex Share Just Got Better blog series is a two-part series that highlights some incredible new features available with Webex Share. Customers can now increase screen productivity and enjoy secure, wireless guest sharing!

The Power of the Webex Platform

In the previous post you learned how the Webex experience may permeate more of your office spaces while optimizing the productivity of your TV screens through Digital Signage and increasing the occasions of collaboration beyond the walls of your conference rooms.

With this article, you will discover how the power of the Webex Platform lowers the hurdle for guests to wirelessly share their screens on your Cisco-enabled TV.

Nightmare Before Sharing

How many times you had a guest visiting your office eager to give you a very promising presentation or demo, and it took forever to get his screen onto the main TV in the room? Everybody gets distracted during troubleshooting and momentum is lost. Welcome to the club of frustrated hosts!
Do you remember why it was so hard? I’ll refresh your memory:

Someone took the HDMI adapter and forgot to return it.
The room is not equipped with the latest HDMI adapter compatible with your guest’s laptop.
The guest didn’t have admin rights on his laptop and could not install your wireless sharing app.
The guest didn’t want to install anything on his machine.
The guest preferred not to plug any wireless sharing USB device into his laptop, for security reasons.
Nobody on your team took the initiative to provide your guest with corporate guest network access, and it takes too long to do it on the fly.

Our customer IT decision-makers don’t like the most common wireless sharing solutions the market is offering, as they come at a cost in terms of security and/or management:

Wireless sharing guest solutions based on LAN configuration require bridging the guest Wi-Fi network (used by the guest) with the corporate one (where the wireless sharing devices operate), generating security concerns.
Some require on-premises local servers and/or end-user apps, which must be installed and managed over time by IT.
Some require USB dongles which introduce the need for asset tracking, as well as scare off guests due to security concerns.

Despite significant progress in wireless sharing technologies, none of the major players came up with an elegant and secure solution to lower the hurdles and allow guests to wirelessly share their screen, until now. Often, the only fallback option is to use the HDMI cable, provided the right adapter dongles are – miraculously – still there on the conferencing table.

Finally, Your Guest will be able to Share!

After thorough customer research, the Webex team came up with a powerful solution that will get you one step closer to eliminating cables from your meeting room tables, by leveraging the Webex Cloud platform power.

Your beloved guest has to follow a few simple steps:

Open the browser and navigate to devices.webex.com
Input the 9-digit unique device identifier shown on the TV screen to pair with your Webex Share device
Input the 4-digit security PIN
Hit “Share Screen”
Pick what to share: a single application or the entire screen

Voilà! Your guest is sharing in 30 seconds without the need for any app, account, hard-coded firewall traversal, USB dongle, or local server.

For those who are wondering why there’s a 4-digit security PIN challenge, the answer is security.

Both the 9-digit device identifier and the security PIN change every few minutes and they are designed to make sure the guest is in physical proximity with your device, preventing from hostile remote sharing.

In order to share, the only requirements your guest has to meet are:

Internet access – it doesn’t matter whether through a mobile hotspot or your guest network. Our customers clearly stated that nowadays internet access is taken for granted, making our solution very viable.
A modern browser that supports WebRTC – pretty much any recent version of any browser would do the trick.

Guest Sharing has been released across the entire portfolio of Cisco cloud-registered endpoints, therefore providing a consistent experience in every kind of workspace.

The Webex team is actively working on more guest sharing capabilities, for instance allowing guests to share their screen in-meeting. Stay tuned for more details!