From a Space
If you’re already working together in a space, anyone can start an instant meeting to meet right away or schedule one for later. With these types of meetings, everyone in the space gets invited automatically and gets treated like a host. Therefore, during the meeting, everyone can let people in, mute people, and record. Since you’re meeting in the same space where you’re working, you get easy access to your messages, files, and whiteboards, and you can work on them while you’re in the meeting.
From a Calendar
From your Meetings calendar, you can start a meeting right away in your Personal Room. You’ll see this option if you have a host license, and it gives you a virtual conference room assigned just to you. Because it’s your own room, your link is always the same.
If you don’t see that choice, you can still schedule a meeting with anyone else. You don’t need to be connected to them in the app, and they don’t even need to have a Webex account. Plus, you or anyone you assign as a co-host can start the meeting, invite people to it, start breakout sessions, enable recording transcripts, and more. Figure 6-11 shows how to schedule a Webex meeting from the Webex app.
Figure 6-11 Scheduling a Webex meeting
Upcoming Meetings
Knowing what meetings you have can help you plan your workday. You can view details about your upcoming meetings in your meetings list, such as what the meeting is about, when it’s happening, who’s invited, and who scheduled the meeting. When it’s time for a meeting to start, you can join it from the meetings list, too. Figure 6-12 shows upcoming meetings in Webex.
Figure 6-12 Upcoming meetings in Webex
Webex Meetings Security Update
Webex Meetings provides the highest level of security in the industry based on a simple product development methodology: secure by design, and not as an afterthought. Considering recent events in the video conferencing industry, where malicious actors have been disrupting users’ meetings, Cisco has performed security audits of customers’ site settings to help prevent such unwanted outcomes. Meetings are protected by passwords to provide the most secure experience for attendees joining using the Webex app on their desktop and mobile devices. Users who are signed into their Webex account will continue to join their meetings as quickly as before, and external users will be prompted for the meeting password before they can join meetings.
In addition, Webex has added additional security features:
• Automatically lock Personal Room after 10 minutes.
Automatically locking your Personal Room meetings prevents unwanted people from joining your meetings. If you haven’t already enabled it, Webex will now automatically lock your Personal Room 10 minutes after the meeting starts.
When someone tries to join a locked meeting, they’ll be asked to wait in your lobby, and you’ll get a notification. You can decide if you want to admit them into the meeting or let them stay in the lobby. Figure 6-13 shows how Webex automatically locks a Personal Room Webex meeting.
Figure 6-13 Locking Personal Room Webex meeting
• Enforce meeting password when joining from phone or video conferencing systems.
Users joining your meetings using a telephone or a video conferencing system will now be required to enter a numeric meeting password before being admitted into the meeting. You’ll find the numeric meeting password in the email invitation. The password cannot be disabled and overrides previously disabled password settings.
• When a meeting is in progress, the meeting host (and co-host) using Webex apps or Webex devices are presented with messages to inform them of new users in the lobby as well as controls to admit these users to the meeting or remove them from the meeting/lobby. Users in the meeting lobby are grouped and managed in three categories:
• Internal: Signed-in (authenticated) users in your organization
• External: Signed-in (authenticated) users outside of your organization
• Unverified users: Unauthenticated guest users, whose identity is not verified
Figure 6-14 shows participants in a meeting categorized as Internal, External, or Unverified.
Figure 6-14 Participants categorized as Internal, External, or Unverified