Scheduling WebEx Meetings Is Easier (and Faster) than Ever

I am not alone. According to The New York Times, roughly 43% of Americans work remotely at least part of the time. This represents a huge change in traditional work paradigms: Businesses are a lot less rigid because they realize that in most cases, where people work is less important than the actual work people do.

But working remotely can have challenges, especially when it comes to collaborating with others. This is why we continue to drive improvements with WebEx – to bring you the best meetings whether you are working in an office, from home, or anywhere you happen to be. If you’ve been following our recent collaboration posts, you’ve read about some of these enhancements. I want to share just a few more.

The fastest join experience yet

Have you ever been late to join an online meeting, only to have to wait for the meeting to load — making you even later? We’ve solved that. We added “the big green button” to WebEx Productivity Tools, letting you start or join a meeting with just a simple click of that green button.

We’ve improved our meeting join time by 18% over the last six months. All this to make sure you can get started on time.

And unlike other vendors, we have made it super simple to manage upgrades to the WebEx Productivity Tools. If your site is set for automatic updates, IT no longer needs to spend time or energy notifying users to update the app. WebEx notifies users directly, so they get the latest and greatest WebEx version all the time without any effort from IT.

Simple scheduling and fast joining from Google Calendar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5l6j-cgG5Y

Scheduling meetings can be time-consuming, but we’ve addressed that for Google Calendar users. In addition to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar now integrates with WebEx. Now, scheduling a WebEx meeting is always easy no matter what calendaring tool you use. Schedule your Personal Room meeting and attach it directly to the Google Calendar event or start and join a Personal Room directly from your Google-linked accounts. All this is enabled with the Cisco WebEx scheduler plug-in, which is essentially the WebEx Productivity Tool, optimized for Google. It’s available in the Chrome Web Store. This is a great tool for those of you in the education industry or other industries adopting Google as your main email tool client.

And remember, you can always add @webex to the location field in your invite to schedule meetings when WebEx is deployed with Cisco Spark Hybrid Calendar Service. It supports Google Calendar and Outlook.

Making it personal

Business can often feel impersonal, so providing a degree of personalization can make a positive difference in your workday. As you can see from these examples, personalization and user experience are paramount to our innovation strategy. We’ve been working to create more personal meeting experiences for years. One capability that I most appreciate is the Personal Room. With it, I have my own unique, customizable meeting URL. Simple to remember and easy to share, the Personal Room is one of the most essential WebEx features and one we actively seek to improve. We’ve meticulously woven the Personal Room into our scheduling flows, as you can see with our Productivity Tools improvements as well as our new Google Calendar integration.

We’re continuing to improve on WebEx one feature at a time – continuing to bring you more flexibility and options with every update to make working wherever you are easy. This is how we do collaboration at Cisco.

Get started:
Download the Cisco WebEx Scheduler for Google Calendar.