Elevating Calls, Custom Layouts, Post-Meeting Summary and More in the Webex App April Update

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Webex App April Update

As we spring into April, we’re excited to share features that help employees collaborate seamlessly and transform their experiences wherever you work. In this month’s release we’re making it easier to move calls to full-featured meetings and this is especially useful when you hop on impromptu calls or are working on the go and return to your desk. For meetings, we deliver the ability to customize video layouts to personalize your viewing experience and we’re helping you make the most of your meetings—you’ll now see a post-meeting summary. In messaging, videos are now easier than ever to view and access from within the app.

Read more below for information about our latest capabilities.

Calling in Webex

Webex enables continuous collaboration from a simple phone call. If you’re on a call, you can now elevate the call to a full-featured meeting with a few clicks of the keyboard without anyone going on hold. Invite additional attendees you’d like to join the discussion. They’ll receive a notification to join the meeting, and from there all participants can take advantage of AI transcriptions, real-time translations, notes and action items, and recordings. You can even move calls to a meeting when you’re talking to people outside your organization. Imagine calling a customer and during the conversation an immediate request is raised, you can elevate the call to a meeting, add your manager and additional account managers and work quickly to resolve the issue. You’ll even have a seamless experience during quick impromptu calls or calls you take on the go, where you want to use advanced meetings features. Available for Unified CM in early April and coming soon for Webex Calling.

Watch how to elevate your call to a meeting

Sharing content has never been easier and it won’t slow you down. We’ll automatically optimize your shared content for text, image, or video for better experience. When you share a video, you’ll no longer need to select a higher frame rate to share. It will automatically determine the optimized setting to share your content at the highest quality required. And that’s not all, when you’re sharing content, you can now pause and resume the share. Envision giving a presentation and time is running short so you want to skip a head a few slides or even jumping to another presentation, you’ll hit pause, the participants will continue to see the last shared slide, you’ll navigate to the next content you’d like to feature and resume the share. Changing slides or presentations occurs all in the backend, unseen by the participants and helps you present a smooth and flawless presentation. These features are also available in meetings.

- Webex app with Unified CM: As a remote worker on a mobile device, users will have an improved user experience with single sign-on (SSO). The first time you enter the Webex app or when your login expires, you’ll enter a one-time username and password and that’s it. Make phone calls through your company call control with ease and don’t let being on the go slow you down.

Meetings in Webex

Custom Layouts: We’ve been working to deliver a more personalized experience, and the latest advancements to the Webex layout options is about making the meeting experience tailored to your preferences. First off, we’re introducing the ability to zoom in and out in grid view. Say you’re in a large meeting and are seeing 25 people per page. But if you really just want to focus on a few, say 4-6, you can simply use the slider at the upper right corner of the Webex meeting window and zoom in to see those folks bigger, or zoom all the way out and see as many people as possible. You can do this at any time in the meeting to suit your desire or need to see the people you want.
Another new layout allows you to customize stage view by dragging and dropping people onto the Webex “stage.” This new feature gives you more control over who and what you want to focus on simply by moving anyone from the filmstrip onto the stage. For example, I may want to see the presenter and their content side by side. Or imagine the case when there is a sign-language interpreter in the meeting. As a hearing-impaired user, I can pull the sign language interpreter into view so that they show prominently on the stage, regardless of who’s speaking or sharing content. As a host, I’ll have the ability to customize the stage and set my stage as the default view for everyone in the meeting.

For some industries, such as financial and federal, data integrity is paramount and, thus, there may be a need for added security to keep communications in-house. Today, this can be achieved with firewalls, but we’ve now given admins the ability to block users from meeting with Webex users from other organizations through a single knob in Control Hub for all their users. In contrast, other conferencing vendors require complicated registries, extensive documentation, and multiple steps to configure. This is simplicity and security in Webex.
Using intelligence to automate common meeting tasks continue to be a priority for us. Webex Assistant has been sending post-meeting notifications to alert hosts that they have recordings, transcripts, action items and highlights to review and share with their team. We’ve now taken it a step further. With the new post-meeting summary feature, these assets will now be automatically populated in a Webex space, beginning first with the meeting recording which streamlines how you access, view and share recordings (and in the future, all meeting assets). As the meeting host, once you wrap up a meeting there are two places where you can access your recordings:
- In the space that you set up for your meeting, your recording will be accessible in the new ‘Recordings’ tab under the ‘Content’ tab.
- For recorded meetings from your Webex Personal Room, you go to the Calendar view to access your recording.

Meeting recordings are now viewed directly within the Webex app and include your meeting transcripts. In addition, recordings in a space do not require a password.

Messaging in Webex

Our goal is to make Webex the single place to collaborate. With that in mind, we have now introduced video playback enhancements which transforms how you access videos on the Webex mobile app. All videos are now clearly identifiable and easier than ever to start, pause and move to full screen all from within the app. We have also streamlined the process to forward videos to other contacts or spaces.

To enhance the experience for our new users, we have added extra clarity to show users how to send their messages. A new send button in the compose area gives clear indication on how to send messages (this is in addition to simply pressing Enter on the keyboard). We have also added instructions above the send button to show how to create a new line in your messages (Shift + Enter).

Webex Platform News

Webex and Webex Meetings will now support Apple computers with M1 silicon processors without requiring you to run Webex with Rosetta (emulator). You will have better performance and experience by running the specific version of the app built for this configuration. The installer for this configuration will soon be available on the Webex d ownloads page.
Webex app on Linux: for the open-source community, we are pleased to announce that Webex is now bringing you messaging, meeting, and one-to-one calling for at work and educational settings. All the core Webex capabilities are supported to help you seamlessly collaborate. This is just the beginning – support for advanced calling and a full-featured meeting experience will be added in the upcoming releases. The .deb and .rpm packages will soon be available on the Webex d ownloads page.