50 shades of Webex

If you’ve got Webex Meetings and Webex Teams, you’ll be forgiven for maybe being confused about the many ways people can host, start and join meetings. There are more than fifty permutations, based on your device, access method, and audio set up.

With Webex Teams, spaces can be created to chat, share files and even switch that chat into a call or meeting. The ability to meet with a whole team with just a couple of clicks is very powerful. Alternatively, you can use the more structured, formal way of creating Webex Meeting invites from your e-mail inbox. And here’s the problem. Which app should we use, and in what way, to get the best meeting outcome?

Best practice is to use Webex Meetings for formal meetings and particularly for those that involve external people. Other examples are using Webex for interviews and high importance meetings with customers. The two most important reasons are:

1. Webex Meetings comes packed with loads of tools to control important meetings, for example muting participants, adding polls, and multiple sharing options.
2. Webex Meetings provides the broadest choice of joining and hosting options, from joining a meeting while you’re queuing for coffee, to walking into a room and pressing a button to start a video room meeting which you scheduled a week ago.

Over time Meetings and Teams will offer exactly the same features, but today, Webex Meetings offers the most flexible ways of connecting and controlling meetings, with richer tools for conducting them efficiently.

Webex Teams is better suited to agile, ad hoc conversations. Many of these conversations start as an exchange of messages in a space and then very quickly switch to an online meeting. Webex Teams also retains information exchanged in a space, from files and links to whiteboards and meeting recordings, keeping all knowledge in one place.

Webex Meetings scheduling can be achieved in many ways. From Outlook, GSuite or the desktop app. Rather than seeing this as too much information, try to see it through the lens of choice and control. It’s just a matter of being shown and coached on the merits of each option, and choosing the one that best suit your personal way of working, with as little disruption as possible.

Adé Benjamin

Responsible for designing, developing and delivering adoption services for the world's leading real time collaboration technologies in the context of workplace transformation, change management and digital disruption.

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