In case you are not familiar, Cisco Spark is a tool that provides messaging, meeting, and calling in a seamless experience. One of its features is called teams. A team is a collection of users working on a shared goal. Each team has spaces (formerly known as rooms) where users can chat, share files, and have meetings. Any team member can join or leave any space in the team at any time. Find Incredible Venues. Book Event Space. No commission, no charges, no fees. Where is your event? Explore Chicago Tribune archive, both historical and recent editions. Find archives for Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Weekly Tribune,. Find newspaper articles and clippings for help with genealogy, history and other research.
This week at Cisco’s Collaboration Summit in Phoenix, we made a series of significant announcements regarding the convergence of the Cisco Webex and Spark platforms. This included a new Webex Meetings application, a new Webex Teams application (formerly known as Cisco Spark), the new Webex Assistant, and the Webex Share hardware device.
Watch a quick overview of our announcements and customer reactions to the new stuff.
The convergence of the Webex and Spark platforms is far more than just a rebrand. Significant technical work has gone into combining these platforms, and I wanted to highlight several of the key customer benefits that come as a result.
Cisco Spark Vs Webex Teams
Spark Meetings are dead. Long live Webex meetings.
Prior to this convergence, we had Cisco Spark with its own type of meeting – the Spark meeting, but we still had Webex with its own Webex meetings. Users could join Cisco Spark meetings only from the Cisco Spark app, and Webex meetings from the Webex app. Users could join Webex meetings from Cisco Spark if they were clever, but they did not get any of the critical meetings features. With this convergence – it’s all simplified. Everything is a Webex meeting, with a common set of features – roster, meeting controls, PSTN connectivity, and so on. All Webex meetings are joinable from either the Webex Meetings application or the Webex Teams application. Webex Teams supports a new type of meeting, called a Webex team meeting, which takes advantage of the participants in a space to provide a highly secure easy to use new type of Webex meeting – the team meeting.
The Webex backbone network now powers all meetings.
Prior to this convergence work, both Webex and Cisco Spark had meetings capabilities, but they were quite disparate. Even in the back end, Webex meetings were supported by servers sitting in the Webex data centers, and interconnected with the powerful Webex backbone IP network. This IP network provides global transport between customer ISPs and our meeting servers, optimizing for video quality. Cisco Spark meetings were powered by servers in public clouds, and weren’t making use of the Webex backbone.
Now, with this convergence, the Webex backbone is used for all meetings, regardless of whether they are joined from the Webex Meetings app or the Webex Teams app. We have meeting servers in both public clouds and in our own data centers. The Webex backbone interconnects with both of them. This means that customers get the best quality, lowest latency experience possible. This is particularly important for video, since the Webex backbone was purpose built for video meetings.
Control Hub gains powerful features for Webex analytics and troubleshooting.
Prior to this convergence, the Cisco Spark management tool – Control Hub – provided some basic analytics for Cisco Spark. Bluestacks opengl not working. Webex customers used a different tool – the site admin – and had a good set of analytics capabilities there. With this platform convergence, the Control Hub now supports customers using both Webex Meetings and Webex Teams, and its analytics functions for Webex Meetings have taken a significant jump forward.
Hybrid Media Services is now called Video Mesh – and works for all Webex meetings.
Prior to this convergence work, Cisco Spark had an amazing capability called hybrid media service. This service allowed a customer to deploy servers on premise which could be used for the audio, video and content share streams for Cisco Spark meetings. But, they worked only for Cisco Spark meetings. With this convergence, these hybrid media nodes can now be used for any Webex meeting type – regular Webex meetings, PMR meetings, and Team meetings.
Users joining those meetings from SIP endpoints, our cloud connected video endpoints, or the Webex Teams app, will connect to these media nodes when joining any of those meetings. With this convergence, we’re also renaming hybrid media services to video mesh, in recognition of the truly disruptive and now broad applicability of this capability.
The industry’s first secure multi-company Collaboration solution.
Specific to Webex Teams, the backend convergence has enabled us to deliver this industry first. It is increasingly common to work outside the boundaries of your company, and our competitors solve for this by allowing guest accounts to be created on their team collaboration instance in the cloud. End users need to ask for administrator intervention to create guest accounts, they need to maintain multiple accounts, and they need to log in and out of the app when they want to collaborate outside of their company. This is a huge pain, but it also creates a huge security risk. Guest accounts enable users to share information outside of their company in a way that cannot be tracked by compliance tools. This means that an employee can accidentally – or purposefully – share confidential information outside the company, and the company won’t be aware of it, and won’t be able to take steps to remove the leak.
We have solved this problem with Webex Teams. All Webex Teams users reside in a single, shared cloud instance – each with just a single account. There are no guest accounts. B2B collaboration is built in so users can work with everyone, both inside and outside of the company, from the same application, without asking their IT guy for help. In addition, this means that each company can make sure that their employees don’t share confidential information outside of the company, and if they do, it can be detected and remediated. Webex is the industry’s first Team Collaboration solution to deliver secure multicompany collaboration.
As you can see, the convergence of Cisco Spark and Webex is not just skin deep – it goes to the platform level and brings an amazing set of benefits to our customers.
For the past few months, I’ve been using the teams feature of Cisco Spark to manage the projects that my team – the Chief Technology Office in the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group (CTG) – is undertaking. This experiment has been a smashing success and I wanted to share the interesting way in which I’ve been using Cisco Spark.
Cisco Spark Teams
In case you are not familiar,Cisco Sparkis a tool that provides messaging, meeting, and calling in a seamless experience. One of its features is called teams. A team is a collection of users working on a shared goal. Each team has spaces (formerly known as rooms) where users can chat, share files, and have meetings. Any team member can join or leave any space in the team at any time. (Read more about teams.)
The CTO organization is a really interesting one: We’re 25 engineers across 9 time zones. Most of us are senior and heavily engaged in projects across CTG. In fact, the CTO organization supports around 20 distinct projects. I needed a lightweight way to keep tabs on the progress of each initiative and to have a continuous dialog on how we’re doing against goals.
To facilitate that, we created a new Cisco Spark team called “CTO FY17 Initiatives.” Into this team went all the members of my organization. We then created a space within that team for each initiative. The first screenshot, taken from my actual Cisco Spark application, shows our first few initiatives.
For example, one of our initiatives is working in the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) on a next-gen codec. So, there is a space called “AOM” in the “CTO FY17 Initiatives” team. I have 20 initiatives, and thus 20 spaces within the team. The owners of each initiative joined the space for the initiative they own. In the beginning of each quarter, the initiative owners create a single slide summarizing their goals for the quarter and post that slide into their respective space. Each Friday, they post a weekly update into the initiative space. I review the update, post questions, and we have a dialog in the space about how the work is going.
This has worked really, really well. First, it provides me a single place I can go to see all of my team’s initiatives in a single list. In the past, that list would be in a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint slide somewhere on my desktop, and I’d have to hunt for it. Now, with Cisco Spark it’s easy to find. Battlefield 3 steam.
The real benefit is that everything is together. In the past, my PowerPoint Initiative list was disconnected with the quarterly goals (usually on a different slide), which was even more disconnected with the discussions around each initiative, which were spread across calls, emails, and Cisco Spark chats.
By using Cisco Spark teams, it is now all in one place. The team list shows me all the initiatives. With one click, I can go into each initiative, and click on the files activity to see the quarterly goals. The messages in the space show me the weekly updates and conversations I’ve had around them.
Because spaces are persistent, I have an easy way to go back and look at the agreed upon goals, review the progress and discussions each week, and easily understand the current situation and history. This is literally a dream come true for project management.
Another benefit of having all of the initiatives in a single team, in one place, is that I can easily run through the list and visually confirm that I received updates on each. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, by simply looking at the team list every Friday I can quickly see which initiatives are missing a weekly update. The blue dot indicates there is a new message–in this case, a new update.
This allows me to really be on top of everything. If I haven’t seen an update as expected, I can post a message asking for status. In the past, this would have been really, really hard to do: I’d have to pull up my initiative list in PowerPoint, do multiple searches in email against the owner name and/or topics to find emails with updates, and then if I didn’t see something, I’d have to create a new email asking for updates. That’s the kind of tedious project management that no one likes to do. By using Cisco Spark in this way, those days are gone. In just a few minutes I can see the latest update in every initiative and poke when there wasn’t one.
My team also likes using Spark teams because they feel that I have better visibility into what they’re working on each week. In the past, we’ve relied on larger infrequent updates or weekly one-on-one meetings. Now that we’re using Spark Teams, we can use our scheduled one-on-one meetings to focus on other topics and discussions because we’re already current on the initiatives. Crossover 2019 best. Furthermore, it is easy to bring other members of my team into any one of the initiatives spaces should I need them to join the discussion. With all the past messages and documents already in the space, they’re up to speed in no time.
The open nature of the team means everyone in my organization has full visibility into progress and can drop in and out of each of the initiative space to chime in as they see fit. This makes everyone feel included.
I’ve used many tools over my career to manage programs for a small team. Cisco Spark is by far the best. Its persistence, its integration of messaging and content, and its teams feature have made it the best tool I’ve ever used for staying engaged with my team on their individual initiatives and keeping track of progress against goals.
Cisco Spark Teams
Got a small team you want to manage? Give this a try and let me know how it works for you.
Cisco Spark Teams Download
Start by visiting theCisco Spark siteand downloading the app.
Cisco Spark Microsoft Teams Integration