Cisco Webex Meetings

The Webex Meetings app is a Cisco app designed to make meetings and collaboration easier. In an age where so many people use Zoom, but aren't sure why its the main option, it's another way to get meetings done.

With more people working from home, having meetings at home, training for jobs, and having classes, it's worth noting what was worked since prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Webex has been a mainstay, but it takes a bit of setting up on the presenter's side. As a user downloading this app? No big deal.

Cisco's Webex system gives you a meeting room that can be setup as a classroom, a meeting room with a whiteboard, a screen share area, and many more things. For conferences, Webex has been a mainstay for abroad teams for years.

There are both video and audio presentation options. You can handle the standard video call process that many companies expect, but a chat and collab system is different. It's not about complex programming, but user experience (UX) that feels more intuitive.

While Webex can feel a bit dated, it has a lot of tools that simply work. For the classroom and training side of the app, there is a simple hand raising/allowed access system where you can either let everyone chime in as they want, mute everyone and unmute as needed, or do a first come, first serve digital hand raising.

For the people actually setting up Webex rather than just being users, there are a few features that aren't activated by default. Consider turning these on:

Whiteboard shape and gesture recognition. Instead of struggling to draw a straight-edge triangle or other shapes, Webex will draw a close enough shape when you try to draw.

Breakout sessions. Split your users into groups for group projects without everyone being jumbled together. They all get their own whiteboard and other tools.

Editing messages with attachments. If you send a message, but want to add an attachment later, you can slip it in later with this. It's a risk for public companies because someone could find an old message and toss in a suspicious link later, but if you know your team or aren't worried about suspicious links, it's fine.

Slack integration. Slack is one of the best collaborative communication options out there. It would destroy everything else if it branched out to a public app, but they do one thing well and that's respectable. Webex allows Slack integration, means you can get easy chat and call features on slack that can be pushed over to Webex.