Team collaboration. Sounds redundant. Isn’t collaboration inherently about teams working together? Isn’t every team interaction about getting things done?
Collaboration has always connected us. At Cisco, we’ve been building apps to help people collaborate for quite a while. Cisco Jabber and Webex Meetings enable millions of enterprise users to get work done with chat, calling, and meetings capabilities.
But connecting our teams to do things like work on projects from start to finish, solve complex problems, and build relationships – in a single place, with the ability to connect anywhere, anytime? That’s something we hadn’t really seen before.
Help teams work better together
As leaders in several enterprise collaboration categories, we have unique insight into how global ecosystems connect and get things done. One core insight is that most work is done by teams – not individuals. The way to achieve great things is to assemble a diverse, dispersed, and multi-disciplinary team. Yet these are the very attributes that sometimes act as barriers to teamwork. As teams have become more dispersed and complex, the challenges of effective collaboration are often why projects fail.
As such, the word Teams in our newest Cisco Webex product is far more than a trendy term. It’s about building around how you work today – for the teams that deliver your organization’s products, services, and customer experiences.
Cisco Webex Teams is much more than a rebranded Cisco Spark app, we’re delivering a new way of moving work forward. Use it to:
- Send messages and share files
- Express your ideas on whiteboards that others can work on too
- Use high-quality video meetings and make calls
- Keep up-to-date with what’s happening in other apps
Anytime, anywhere, on virtually any device.
It’s all enabled by the expanded Cisco Webex suite, which brings together meetings, calling, and all of the modern teamwork tools in Webex Teams to deliver a truly differentiated team collaboration experience.
What’s new?
Today marks the beginning of a new user interface that we’ll deliver over the next few months. Here are some of the key aspects of the improvements:
- A fresh, clean, and intuitive app design built for instant team productivity with simplicity for all users, especially first-time users.
- Seamless access to all activities and tools needed for teamwork, moving your team beyond group messaging. Spaces will provide teams with all the collaboration activities in a more balanced way, encouraging more than just chat.
- Improvements to how you view and join your meetings
- Simpler ways to bring your team’s work from the meeting room back to your desk with Cisco Webex Board.
In today’s app update, we’re giving you a new way to visually identify important notifications in Webex Teams spaces:
- A blue dot now appears next to spaces where you’ve requested a notification.
- An @ sign appears next to spaces where someone has mentioned you.
- All other spaces with unread messages show in bold type.
- A new Notifications filter and the app badge help you identify what you want to zero in on first.
We look forward to delivering additional updates soon and we’ll keep you posted here. And don’t forget — if you love something, tell us. If you dislike something, tell us that too! We take feedback seriously and will celebrate the good and work to improving the things you don’t like.
From our team to yours, welcome to Webex Teams.
Next steps: Get started!
For new users, welcome to Webex Teams! If you’re an existing Cisco Spark user, here’s what you need to do to get the updates.
For mobile app users: Just update your Cisco Spark app as normal to get Webex Teams.
For web users: If you’re signed in, just log out and log in again. You’ll be welcomed to the updated Webex Teams experience.
For desktop users: Cisco Spark will update to Webex Teams as part of the regular update process, unless you are a Mac user with no admin permissions. If that’s the case, check out this article.
For Cisco Webex device users (formerly Cisco Spark devices): Your device will update as part of the regular update process.
By Damien McCoy
Published with permission from blogs.cisco.com