Cisco challenges the tyranny of Outlook with short, self-terminating Webex meetings
- Reference: 1607493490
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/09/cisco_webex_upgrades/
- Source link:
That empowerment schtick is partly Cisco making sure it's seen to be on the side of racial justice and inclusiveness, and partly the usual ShinyHappy™ from marketing. It's also an admission that a matchbox-sized video window is a tough stage on which to communicate and doubly challenging for those who aren't talkative or assertive by nature.
Cisco has also noticed that web-based meetings are seldom spontaneous and reckons that's not a good thing.
Enter the villain of the piece: Microsoft Outlook. Jeetu Patel, GM and senior veep of Cisco's security and applications business, reckons that meetings have been shoved into Outlook's default 30-minute blocks and that workers have unquestioningly followed Microsoft's arbitrary preference.
Cisco's response is a "Quick Sync meeting template" that allows WebEx users to schedule meetings of any length. Those meetings feature a countdown timer and self-terminate when the clock hits 00:00.
Cisco mostly silent on when and what it knew about malicious WebEx wipeout [1]READ MORE
There's also a new meeting format that allows quick chats to be arranged by just adding people to a list and firing up the meeting. This, apparently, enhances productivity. Just as interrupting a bunch of people and dragging them into a meeting room used to enhance productivity back when we went to meeting rooms.
Another of Cisco's new "meeting templates" gives each participant a set time in which they occupy centre stage. This one's to give introverts the abovementioned "voice".
Other upgrades include the ability to make a presenter's video window small so that the content they're displaying will be larger and more engaging. That feature is one example of a "stage" that now lets WebEx users make different video chat participants more or less prominent to suit the content being delivered.
Noise cancellation has been enhanced so that those working from home in noisy environments or using a blender during a meeting will be heard. The blender is not a rhetorical flourish: Cisco's demo literally showed off a user making a smoothie while collaborating productively.
At this point, readers might be wondering how Cisco is making online meetings 10 times better than they are in the real world.
[2]
The new Webex Desk Hub. Click to enlarge
The company didn't have great answers for this. One exec pointed out that Webex's Presence feature lets a manager understand who among their team is available, all over the world. Try doing that in the real world, the audience was told. Or try doing that with MSN Messenger in the year 2000, or Slack, or Teams, or any other tool that uses Presence because it is just not a new thing.
A more impressive argument was made for tech aimed at field workers, who can use Webex to contact an office-bound subject matter expert. The two can then use video to display whatever problem is being addressed in the field, and the subject matter expert can even annotate the field worker's video feed to demonstrate how to fix it.
Quick Sync meetings feature a countdown timer and self-terminate when the clock hits 00:00
Also impressive was real-time translation into captions below speakers’ video windows. Webex has also gained the power to identify common gestures so they can be rendered as emojis and offer feedback to speakers.
Feedback will also flow from new analytics features Cisco said will produce a social graph of interactions across a company so that managers can understand if their teams are "building the relationships they need to be successful". Just how success metrics are determined was not discussed. Privacy was assured.
While Webex is Cisco's most visible SaaS product, the company couldn't resist the chance to throw some new hardware at us. A forthcoming "Desk Hub" looks to offer an integrated screen and stand/wireless charger for smartphones and will identify users and their system privileges so they can pile straight into online collaboration even if they're using a hot desk in a COVID-shrunk office they may visit only occasionally. "Webex Desk" is a new 24-inch screen that can be used as a standalone client for Webex or an external monitor. Cisco already has a "Pro" version of this device on sale at four-figure prices. The new product is promised to be "affordable". Cisco also has a new 4K webcam for those tired of baked-in camera performance.
While some of these upgrades aren't new, or aren't major, Cisco does seem to have considered that the collaboration tools that have been so handy in 2020 were designed for a different reality and tried to have a guess at what's needed next.
The Register has asked if the new features change pricing and will update this story if Cisco replies. ®
Get our [3]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/04/cisco_mostly_silent_on_when/
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/09/cisco_provided_webex_desk_hub.jpg
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
`tis in the roadmap.
Meetings or chats
I separate this guff into chats (hows it going, any idea about this, why the f*ck have you put my contract within IR35) with individuals, and meetings with a group. If its a meeting you decide up-front what the meeting is about and what needs to be accomplished for the meeting to complete.
If anyone needs a James Bond like count-down to do effective time-keeping, then it should include some Crystal Maze like features. Anyone useless (or unjustifiably enthusiastic about their own abilities) gets locked in a room until everyone else has gone home.
Re: Meetings or chats
Meeting cut-off in my company is enforced by the Mangalers having meetings scheduled back to back all day, at the appointed hour any talk is drowned out by the rapid 'drop' beeping.
Re: Meetings or chats
Short meetings would entirely be taken by Gary from BizOps introductory remarks about how he and the random vendor he's chosen could do the project and really don't need any IT buy in and anyway IT is insignificant next to the dark side power of being a budget owner. Repeat every 15 minutes for different projects and different Garys...
Ugh - webex
I seem to have used every meeting/screen sharing software ever created over the last few years. Bottom of the heap is WebEx. Sharing my screen yesterday stopped me selecting emails in Outlook. To get the information I needed, I had to stop the sharing, open the email, then start sharing again.
Cisco's Prices
My place is a big Cisco user (various software and hardware products) but once MS-Teams entered the room the Cisco account team realised that they were about to loose the entire collaboration space to Microsoft. The problem, for Cisco, is cost. Microsoft bundle Teams as part of your standard Office 365 package and it's tough to compete with free* - doubly so when you charge Cisco's sky high prices. (I was seeing others already drifting away from Cisco prior to Teams due to Cisco's sky high prices)
I got an NDA heads-up about the Webex Desk Pro months prior to its launch and at the time questioned the price point but Cisco were adamant it would sell.
Cisco want to be the Apple of the corporate world - but they're just not pulling it off.
* Yes I know there's no such thing as a free lunch and we're ultimately paying for it.
For us...
Webex has only 2 features better than Teams/zoom (and even then one of them is only because In house security struggle to grasp remote working contractors is a thing).
1. Telephone support (now mandatory since my main machine is a power book running Catalina... And the pc sound support is a 32bit app...). We used to use this alot since using computer sound on Webex was painful to put it politely, even on fast net connections. Dodgy office WiFi just makes it soo much worse. Teams though, in honesty just seems to work. Sound rarely goes wonky and I've been on meetings in the Highlands of Scotland with only a few cutouts owing to driving into a valley.
2. Recordings - At least a Webex meeting is a small and compact file that can be easily shared... Teams however doesn't want to play nice with remote workers not using our company instance of Office 364 1/2. This makes Teams a poor choice for demos thst everyone needs to refere back to and so now thats all we use Webex for.
Anon because security hate me enough anyway...
Real time translations
This is a fantastic team building tool, speak with an accent (any strong regional seems to work) and enjoy minutes of gibberish being autogenerated for the delight of your fellow workers.
I wish they would fix virtual camera support on MacOS
Used to be able to use something like OBS to produce complex backgrounds (static content, live streams, media), better quality video (Webex vitrual background support is pathetic, even with a green screen and studio lighting) and better audio.
However, since Apple added some security enhancements* to the OS, Webex no longer supports virtual camera devices that things like OBS create. This also affected Zoom and Teams, but they were updated months ago. Lots of requests on the Webex forum for a fix, but no action from Cisco. I wonder if this is an attempt to force people to buy the Cisco "professional" conferencing kit that cost $lots?
I now use Zoom in preference, when I can.
* Webex will only allow plugins signed by Apple or Cisco to run within a Webex session.
Linux support
Screw all this millennial gibberish, when are they going to add native Linux support? Firing a web meeting through the browser is a sure recipe for audio lags and 100% CPU usage.
"building the relationships they need to be successful"
Put a free cafe machine in the office, the best way to make co-workers socialize.
Having to deal almost everyday with Teams and Webex, I prefer the latter: much more enduring, no lag, no audio cut whatever the number of participants, not like the former.
The shiny new devices marketing loves? Hmmm... I will let the marketing play with it, I don't need more crap on my desk, thank you.