March 7, 2017
When people talk about Cisco WebEx Teams, they tend to approach it from one of two directions. The first school of thought is to classify Teams the ultimate collaboration tool. It combines video, chat, calling, and presence into a persistent meeting space to help your company communicate and collaborate more effectively. Alternatively, Teams is a cloud-hosted PBX system. By purchasing WebEx licenses and the WebEx phones for your organization, you can establish a cost effective PBX system without the need for on-premise hardware. Remember, that’s on top of all the valuable collaboration tools.
Both of these interpretations of WebEx Teams are accurate and valid, but they don’t quite capture the whole story. They illuminate very clearly what WebEx Teams can do, but they don’t touch on its purpose.
WebEx Teams is best thought of as an extension of your meeting.
WebEx Teams: An Extension of the Meeting
Let’s take a standard meeting as an example. A small team of professionals from several departments books a conference room in the office to discuss a project. Three people meet in person and one person calls in. The project is discussed, notes are taken, and, when finished, the team disperses to complete their assigned tasks.
When the meeting ends, what happens to it? It disappears into the ether. WebEx Teams preserves the meeting and extends it beyond the hour where the team members were actually conversing. It does so using collaboration tools, thereby increasing the effectiveness and value of each meeting moving forward. WebEx Teams shows its value both during the meeting and afterwards.
- File Sharing: This is both valuable during the meeting to get everyone on the same page and after the meeting adjourns. The persistent space will house and display any uploaded files for future reference.
- Meeting Recordings: When using Webex within Teams meetings, a recording of the meeting can be instantly posted to the meeting room allowing for a more in-depth review of planning and strategy conversations.
- Whiteboarding: The whiteboard tool allows each team member to draw sketches and diagrams simultaneously. Then, simply take a snapshot of the whiteboard and save it to the meeting room.
- Calling: During the actual meeting, WebEx facilitates calls using its cloud PBX system. Whether on mobile or a desktop, users can call into a shared WebEx space and collaborate.
- Integrations: Using other application integrations, WebEx users can set up notifications to keep the team notified of any changes to the project. For example, WebEx can ping the user anytime their name is mentioned during the meeting.
WebEx Teams IS the Meeting
WebEx isn’t a tool for meetings. It embodies the meeting itself, and by extension, it embodies the entire project. WebEx meetings have a life, and they live on after the call ends or the team leaves the conference room. By adjusting the way we think about WebEx, it shifts the conversation away from what WebEx can do to focus on what really matters—how it will improve the quality and productivity of your meetings.
Like what you read?
About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.