Why Webex is the go-to collaboration platform
Why Webex is the go-to collaboration platform
Interest in collaboration and videoconferencing tools has exploded over recent weeks – for obvious reasons. In this blog, we’re discussing why Cisco Webex Teams is our top choice collaboration platform – and one which will see your organisation through many challenges beyond Covid-19.
Unified communications
Effective collaboration is a multichannel collaboration. After all, in-person collaboration isn’t just about talking to other members of your team – it’s about viewing the same piece of work and discussing it simultaneously. It’s about collecting feedback on-the-spot. It’s about agreeing next steps and timelines. It’s about sharing different pieces of work with different individuals and groups. And it’s about being able to quickly check back in with an individual or team at any time. As such, remote collaboration tools need to facilitate all of these functions, not just a simple videoconference or phone call.
Cisco Webex Teams achieves this flexibility by combining multiple functions, from instant messaging to file sharing, whiteboarding to videoconferencing – and simple phone calls – all through a single unified communications platform.
Ease of use
Not every member of staff in a typical organisation is a technical wizard, delighted to get to grips with new tools and technologies – particularly when remote working has been facilitated in a hurry, as in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. For many employees, the priority is simplicity and ease of use – which is precisely how Cisco Webex Teams has been designed.
Consider the process of scheduling meetings. This is as simple as adding @webex to the location field of the invite – the join information is then automatically imported so there is no need to worry about whether all the invitees have the right information to join their virtual meeting.
Or, consider background noise once you are actually in a meeting – a particular problem when children are home from school! Background noise detection technology is built into Cisco Webex Teams from the start, so the participant is then alerted to mute their line.
Flexibility and convenience
Not all staff in the same organisation need to use collaboration technology in the same way, and Cisco Webex Teams enables different sets of functions to be made available for different departments and teams, increasing user-friendliness. Cisco Webex Teams is hosted in the cloud, so features are synchronised everywhere, both in terms of specific configurations for different user groups, and in terms of the experience for individual users across multiple devices. You can, for example, join a call from a laptop and move it seamlessly to a mobile or video device.
Integration
Cisco Webex Teams is a powerful platform, but it does not stand alone. It integrates smoothly with myriad third-party apps such as Salesforce, Trello, and Box. Furthermore, users can join meetings from a variety of different devices, including Apple Watches and Android wearables, and a variety of different applications, including Google Calendar and even Microsoft Skype for Business.
Quality
It is worth underlining that Cisco has brought all its expertise as a giant of enterprise technology to develop one of the highest-quality collaboration tools on the market. The video experience is crisp and clear – even for more than 1000 concurrent participants. Speaker tracking and auto-framing offer an intelligent, automated means of imitating face-to-face meetings on-screen.
Only time will tell as at how long this shift to en masse home working will need to be maintained – and indeed, what long-term changes it will introduce to working practices across the world. Many commentators are already speculating that this unprecedented event will ultimately prove to be the catalyst for a wholescale shift to more flexible, remote and adaptable working, as organisations realise just how much productivity can be maintained through staff working different hours, and from their own homes. But one thing is for sure – collaboration technology will be at the heart of making that happen, and we think that Cisco Webex Teams is the perfect choice.