For those of us familiar with the key features of Mezzanine – connecting multiple users with multiple streams of content from multiple locations and sources simultaneously – the benefits for productivity are obvious. But how do you introduce these “multi-share” capabilities of Mezzanine to the Cisco Webex end user who hasn’t yet experienced it? The ones who think you can still only share one stream of content at a time?
The answer is to do it with an interface that is at once familiar and yet also offers the opportunity to discover multi-share along the way, so that users can start with what they know, and add more as they go. This is exactly what we’ve done for customers ordering Mezzanine software through the Cisco GPL.
By making it easy to discover multi-share in the course of normal business more users will get to experience the benefits of Mezzanine more quickly than with typical “new technology” deployments. It’s just there without needing to go look for it.
There are several indicators in Cisco Webex videoconferencing environments that help users understand the ready state of the technology – background colors for example. In a Cisco system, a white background always means the system is awake and a meeting is about to get underway. This is true for the new Cisco-first Mezzanine UI as well. Over this familiar white background we’ve added prompts to guide users toward more flexible ways to share their screens. These prompts include options to share via wired connections or wirelessly via the Mezzanine app.
Standard videoconferencing environments come with a standard limitation: only one person can share their content at a time. But in reality, it's very common that more than one person came to the meeting with something worth showing! In a Mezzanine-enabled room, artificial limitations go away and people can share what they want to share. Content is laid out automatically. Suddenly, new opportunities to compare, contrast, and cross-reference are immediately available. With our award-winning remote, it’s easy to grab, move and scale these content windows for maximum viewing. Desktop and iOS apps provide more ways to control the meeting too. With the flexible layout and variety of simultaneous controls, it’s easy for users to zoom in on what’s important and arrange content on the fly.
Our user testing indicates this path of self-guided discovery for Mezzanine multi-share is highly memorable and engaging. Of course all the great Mezzanine features are still intact with this new user experience. Meeting participants can share up to 10 live streams and have full control over the content on the screens for ultimate layout flexibility to support multi-dimensional conversations. With this new UI it is obvious teams can get more out of every single meeting.
Dive into more details on our web site. If you're in Webex Teams it’s easy to just reach out and Ask Oblong a question. We look forward to helping you bring multi-share to more people in more places, with all your Cisco Webex deployments (old and new.)
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