How many meetings have you spent being distracted by characters such as the heavy breather, the distracted driver or the hold music culprit? Web meetings can be a really productive way to stay in touch and work together with your colleagues and clients but there are many considerations to keep in mind to make sure you’re not a meeting offender. We pulled together a short video with some pointers to remind us all of the standard WebEx etiquette.
5 WebEx Etiquette Tips
1. Look your best: WebEx is the ideal place to hone what we like to call your “business mullet”: business up top, party below the camera. If you keep things professional (read: no bathrobes or Hawaiian shirts), you can feel free to wear your sweats and slippers when not in view. Just remember to turn your camera off before you stand up or else be ready for the onslaught of office hazing. (see this in the video at :32)
2. Know when to share video: Many computers and mobile devices now offer built-in cameras, which are a great way to connect with the people you meet with… but not every situation is the same. Use common sense – keep your camera off while you’re driving or in a chaotic environment such as the airport that will be distracting for others involved. Put it on when you want to have a more natural conversation or show product details and examples. (see this tip in the video at :54)
3. Keep your microphone muted: You can’t always control when your doorbell will ring, when the car behind you honks or when your neighbor’s dog will go after the mailman. When in doubt, keep your line muted (either on your phone or by manually muting yourself on WebEx). If you’re the meeting host, you also have the power to mute people manually so you don’t waste precious time asking the heavy breather to tone it down. Read More »
Lately I had been spending a lot of time in the office rather than on the road. Which isn’t all bad, as it gives me some semblance of a routine rather than living out of a suitcase. It has also has given me some spare time to come up with another blog topic, which actually stems from some of the work I have been doing for customers lately.
Typically when a site survey is being done, we will do spectrum analysis work as well, part of my job entails creating and reviewing documents from this work, prior to delivering them to customers, which means I have been watching a lot of spectrum analysis lately. Most of the customers I have worked with recently have been with CleanAir APs, so they will be able to monitor their environment in real time, once the WLAN is up and running. However it’s always a good idea to perform some spectral analysis while you are walking around doing a site survey. And really why not? If you are there and you have a few minutes, fire up the old spectrum card and get a capture of whats going on with your RF. This helps make sure there aren’t any major layer 1 surprises when you go to install the new WLAN. It doesn’t mean things won’t change, and they often will, due to the dynamic nature of RF. It’s an ever changing environment, so what wasn’t there on Monday, might show up on Tuesday and be gone again by Wednesday.
Before jumping into particular types of interferes let’s talk about some of the data that Cisco Spectrum Expert can show you. Two of the things I like to look at when looking at the RF in Cisco Spectrum Expert, are Real Time FFT and Duty Cycle plots, as pictured below.
The Real Time FFT is showing you is the RF energy in real time measured in dBm, so how loud or quiet the device is. The next is the FFT Duty Cycle, which simply put it’s how utilized the RF is. Let’s say you have a device that is being captured as having a 1% duty cycle. This means it’s using a very small amount of the available ‘air time’ to transmit its data. Conversly if there is a device that is showing a 100% duty cycle it is using up all the ‘air time’ and not allowing other devices to use the RF medium to transmit.
Two other views I find helpful are the Spectrogram views. These display the same info as the plots above, but are plotted out over time. I use them in a few of the examples below.
Never miss an important call, no matter where you are!
I love my smartphone. It wasn’t too long ago that I was lugging around separate devices for my contacts, calendar, music, photos, and Internet access. Now I can surf the Web and access everything I need on a single device. And it makes phone calls!
