ThousandEyes Looking at EchoLink

I’m working with a Cisco service called ThousandEyes. Now, the best application of ThousandEyes would be to spot problems, especially with cloud services. If you offer a service in the cloud and customers are complaining about performance, ThousandEyes can reveal where the bottlenecks exist. Then you can execute a plan of action to get the issues addressed. But, indulge me a moment to explain the excuse I’m using to play with it.

I recently passed my Amateur Radio exam to get licensed again after letting my Advanced license expire 30 years ago. Before I share my new call sign, here’s a note for the benefit of non-hams (ham is common lingo for an Amateur Radio operator). It is customary to use a standard phonetic alphabet when giving your call sign on the air. For example, WB2GJ would be Whiskey Bravo 2 Golf Juliet. But someone might say WB2 George Jetson just for fun. (If you recognize the name, you’re dating yourself. And no hams were doxed for this blog; there is no WB2GJ.)

I mention this because the FCC assigns KI5VDI as my new call sign. I didn’t think any call sign could be worse than the one I had in Colorado, KB0FU. Yeah, say that one out loud and you’ll get it. But KI5VDI? I just know someone will say or at least think “KI5 Venereal Disease Infection”. So, I purchase a vanity call sign similar to my original Advanced call sign, WB2EWS. I get N2EWS. That’s good news. I’m now cured of Venereal Disease Infection.

As a revitalized ham, I find myself listening to a conversation on 2 meters. (We hams refer to frequency ranges by their approximate wavelength. The 144-148 MHz frequency wavelength is about 2 meters.) People you speak with on the 2-meter band are generally very close by. These signals don’t travel far unless you have the opportunity to do something fancy pants like bounce your signal off a meteor. Even then, voice communication would be virtually impossible. So, I am shocked to hear a local Texan talking with someone in South Korea. How? Repeaters extend the range on 2 meters so your signals can jump over objects like mountains or tall buildings, but even a daisy chain of repeaters isn’t going to reach South Korea.

It turns out they are using EchoLink. This free software lets you link your radio to your computer and connect anywhere with VoIP. You talk on the radio, and EchoLink forwards everything to the remote location, typically the other person’s radio connected to EchoLink.

I download and install EchoLink to give it a try. Being a Cisco guy, the first thing I think about is how reliable VoIP will be with this software and EchoLink destinations. Network latency and jitter can be a problem for VoIP.

This is where ThousandEyes (finally) comes in. ThousandEyes analyzes network traffic in detail. Fair warning: This is not a typical reason for using ThousandEyes, and I’m using ICMP to simplify the test. Normally you would use TCP and a port to get a more realistic view. Unfortunately, EchoLink doesn’t like tests on its VoIP port. But even these simple ICMP results are very interesting.

I see that EchoLink chooses a server in San Diego for my connection (nasouth.echolink.org). When I use EchoLink for ham radio, I’ll use it on my personal PC. But I’m testing it on my work PC, which adds a level of complexity since I use a Meraki router on the Cisco network. I install a ThousandEyes agent on my work PC so I can test the network from my work PC to the EchoLink server. The agent isn’t working. What’s my boggle? The agent is a Chrome extension and I’m using Firefox. No problem. I switch to Chrome and be well.

I run the first test. The path visualization (see Figure 1) shows some interesting information. The blue dots are nodes that have ThousandEyes agents. When I click on a blue dot, it shows the node information. The empty circles with numbers are unidentified node hops. The number tells you how many unidentified hops there are in that chain. Not every node in the Interwebs is equipped for ThousandEyes, yet.

Figure 1: The path visualization from the work PC to the EchoLink server

The table view shows the latency and jitter. The jitter is higher than I expected, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

Figure 2: The latency and jitter of this connection

That is only half of an EchoLink connection, though. The other half would go from the contact in South Korea to the San Diego server. When you define a ThousandEyes test, you can pick multiple agents from anywhere in the world. I can even select multiple countries at a time for a single test. In this case, I only want one country, South Korea. But I can specify several South Korea nodes as starting points.

Figure 3: I don’t have the location of a user in South Korea, but I can check various ISPs

The table below shows that all but one source in South Korea have very low latency and jitter. But even the 3.2ms jitter is unlikely to be a problem.

Figure 4: Table of latency and jitter for each South Korea starting point

Now let’s look at the paths. There are enough hops to be an IPA recipe. The red lines are links between two nodes where the delay is greater than 100ms. It is entertaining to hover over the dots to see traffic details. In one case, for Google (gcp asia-northeast3), the first jump is from South Korea to Illinois! Azure koreacentral is the only starting point with a path that has no delays. Since none of the delays add up to a significant latency, as shown in the above table, the delays are unlikely to be significant when using EchoLink.

Figure 5: The paths from South Korea to EchoLink

Let’s try another location for Amber Heards and giggles. How about war-torn Ukraine? Surely this will show network problems.

Figure 6: Choosing starting locations in Ukraine

I see two IPv4 agents in Ukraine, one in Kyiv and the other in Kharkiv. Kyiv uses Deltahost Company. Kharkiv uses Ukrainian Internet Names Center LTD. The results (see Figure 7) are impressive for a war torn country. Check out Figure 8 for the paths. No delays and no dead ends. Do we have Elon Musk to thank for this? I click on a few blue dots and see that several nodes are through Cogent Communications.

Figure 7: Low latency and no jitter to speak of

Figure 8: The paths to freedom

Overall, EchoLink communications should work very well, even to Ukraine.

I’m impressed with ThousandEyes. As more routers become ThousandEyes agents, there should be fewer and fewer unidentified nodes in test results. I’ll keep experimenting and report whatever may be interesting.

Source: cisco.com

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ChatOps: How to Build Your First Webex Bot

In this post, you’ll learn how to create a Webex bot, register a Webhook in Webex, and configure your bot to listen to Webhook – all with plenty of code examples. Check back for more as we build new use cases that leverage different aspects of automation using chat-driven interfaces.

In the DevOps world, we’re always looking for new ways to drive automation around communication. When we deploy new code, scale our deployments, or manage our feature flags – we want our teams to know about it. The Webex API makes it easy to build announcement flows triggered by successful events in our infrastructure. However, if we can trigger those events from Webex as well, then we’ve entered the world of ChatOps.

More Info: 300-835: Automating Cisco Collaboration Solutions (CLAUTO)

ChatOps is the use of chat clients like Webex Teams, chatbots, and real-time communication tools to facilitate how software development and operation tasks are communicated and executed. Using Webex APIs, we can build bots that allow us to enter commands that manage our infrastructure, trigger approval workflows, deploy code, and much more.

Security Disclaimer

Security is a top concern here at Cisco. In normal application development, security should always be built into the initial steps of getting code up and running. Today, we’re going to keep it simple and focus on the basics. Then, we’ll cover how to authenticate and authorize Webhook requests. We’ll hold off on security until the next blog post in our ChatOps series, once we’ve proven an end-to-end connection. 

How to create a Webex bot

First, let’s create a Webex bot using the Webex Developer UI.

Webex for Developers has a great step-by-step guide here to help you get up and running.

Some important things to consider:

◉ Think about what you want to name your bot. It should be intuitive, but unique. Depending on how you set up your Webhook, you may be typing the bot’s name a lot, so take that into account.

◉ The secret token that’s auto-generated for your bot is used for authenticating with the Webex API. When you use this token, Webex will treat your bot like a real user who can create messages, join rooms, or be tagged by other users.

◉ Will this bot interact with a lot of people? Will it have a very public presence, or will it only communicate with a few users? The answer to that question may have an impact on how you want to name it, what icon you select, etc.

Once you’ve taken all of that into account and filled out the bot creation form, you should see something like this, which includes the all-important access token:

How to receive Webhook Events locally

Next, you’ll need to host your bot where it can be accessed by Webex via API calls. If you’re developing locally and want to run a server that’s accessible to the internet, the Webex guide recommends localtunnel.me or ngrok. I went with localtunnel.me for my local environment.

$ npm i -g localtunnel

$ lt --port 3000

The resulting output is the public domain name that you can use to tunnel through to a local port on your machine:

Note: If you’re having trouble running localtunnel via the command line after installing (as a few people have reported here), make sure your PATH includes the directory where NPM installs your binaries. For example, on a Mac, that’s /usr/local/bin. This command might help:

$ npm config set prefix /usr/local

$ npm i -g localtunnel

$ lt --port 3000

How to register a Webhook

Once your internet-accessible endpoint has been set up, you now have a domain that you can use to register a Webex Webhook. Your Webex Webhook will listen to specific events that take place within the Webex platform and notify your web service via HTTP POST requests.

There are multiple ways to register a webhook. Under the hood, however, they all boil down to making your own HTTP POST request. I’ve posted a Postman collection that you can use to make this process a little easier. Fill in your own environment’s variables as you go and include the access token used in the header.

This is what my Postman request looks like:

Feel free to use whatever technology you like, including good old-fashion CURL:

curl --location --request POST 'https://webexapis.com/v1/webhooks' \

--header 'Authorization: Bearer $BOT_TOKEN \

--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \

--data-raw '{

    "name": "simple-webhook",

    "targetUrl": "https://tidy-falcon-64.loca.lt",

    "resource": "messages",

    "event": "created",

    "filter": "mentionedPeople=me"

}'

What’s important to note, is that Webex will send notifications to the domain that you specify in your POST request. If you’re using a tunnel into your local environment, list the domain that was given to you when you activated your proxy.

A very impactful part of your Webhook will be the filter property. This determines which Webex events are sent to your bot as notifications (and which are filtered out). To keep things simple, my bot is only notified when users send a message that specifically mentions it in a Webex Teams Room:

Webex has a nice, convenient tag for this: me uses the authorization token from the request to determine the identity of the user making that request (in this case, our bot), and applies that identity wherever it sees me referenced.

Alternatively, you can set a filter that only triggers notifications for direct messages to your bot, as opposed to mentions in Webex rooms. Since the goal of this post is to broaden visibility into the various processes, these examples show interactions in a Webex Teams Room, however, both are equally viable options.

When you send your POST request, Webex will respond with a body that contains an ID for your Webhook. While you can use the Webex API to GET a list of your Webhooks, it might be a good idea to hold onto this, in case you want to quickly update or delete this Webhook in the future. The Postman collection linked above stores the most recently created Webhook ID in an active_webhook environment variable automatically, which then powers the DELETE call in that collection.

How to create your bot server

For simple use cases, you may want to use the Webex Node Bot Framework, which is great for quick implementation. In order to get more familiar with the different components involved in this series, we’ll start from scratch, diving into the step that powers your Webex bot.

Getting Started with Express

Let’s set up a web server that can listen for POST requests from the Webex Webhook that we’ll create in a minute. This doesn’t have to be complicated for now, just something to demonstrate that we’re able to receive requests. For simplicity, we can use the ExpressJS generator, but you can use any web framework or technology that you like.

$ npm i -g express-generator

$ cd where/you/want/your/project

$ express

Since my IDE handles JavaScript Modules a lot better than it handles require statements, I opted to go with a more modern approach for my dependency management. This is totally optional and has no bearing on how you set up your code. However, if you want to follow the code snippets as I’ve laid them out, you’ll want to do the same. The first step is to add the following key/value pair to your package.json file, anywhere in the root of the JSON object:

"type": "module",

A lot of the boilerplate code can be stripped out if you like – we won’t need a favicon, a public/ folder, or a users route handler. Here’s what my code looked like after I stripped a lot of the simple stuff out:

// in app.js

// notice that I changed the require statements to use JS modules import statements

import express from 'express';

import logger from 'morgan';

import indexRouter from './routes/index.js';

const app = express();

app.use(logger('dev'));

app.use(express.json());

app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: false }));

app.use('/', indexRouter);

// boilerplate error code didn’t change

// …

// **be sure to remember to set app as the default export at the end of the file**

export default app;

Since I’m using JS Modules, I also had to change the executed file in an Express app www/bin to www/bin.js, and revise the boilerplate require statements there as well to use import syntax:

// in www/bin.js

/**

* Module dependencies.

*/

import app from '../app.js';

import _debugger from 'debug';

const debug = _debugger('chatops-webhook:server');

import http from 'http';

// nothing else in this file needed to change

Adding a Route Handler

That takes care of the majority of the boilerplate. At this point, I only have four files in my codebase, despite how many Express gives me out of the box:

◉ app.js

◉ package.json

◉ bin/www.js

◉ routes/index.js

We’ll want to add a route handler that lets us know when we’ve received a POST request from our Webex Webhook. It can be a simple function that prints the request body to the application console – nothing complicated, just a few lines of code:

// in routes/index.js

import express from 'express'

const router = express.Router();

router.post('/', async function(req, res) {

  console.log(`Received a POST`, req.body);

  res.statusCode = 201;

  res.end();

});

export default router;

Give it a try

You now have all of the important components for receiving message notifications from Webex:

◉ A bot to act as an identity for your Webex interactions

◉ If applicable, a network tunnel to expose your local web service to the public internet

◉ A Webhook set up by your bot to receive Webex notifications

◉ A web service to receive Webex notifications on a POST endpoint

Let’s test it out! To keep things simple for now, create a new room in Webex Teams and add your bot as a member. Next, start typing your message, mentioning your Bot (you can use the @ symbol or type its name) as part of the text. When you hit enter, after a brief pause, you should see a request come through to your running web service, which should log the POST body that it received in its console output:

Congratulations, you’ve just set up your very own Webex bot!

What’s next

As promised, our next post will walk through the extremely important aspect of securing our bot. We’ll make sure that only Webex can access it and only authorized users can trigger automation. After that, we’ll move on to new and exciting ways that you can automate everyday workflows right from a Webex Teams Room!

Learn, train, and certify in Cisco Collaboration

As you make your way through this ChatOps series, consider validating your skills with a Cisco Certification.

The 300-835 CLAUTO: Automating and Programming Cisco Collaboration Solutions is a 90-minute exam that counts toward three certifications — the CCNP Collaboration, Cisco Certified DevNet Professional, and Cisco Certified DevNet Specialist – Collaboration Automation and Programmability certifications. Check out the CLAUTO exam topics, and you’ll find that 25% of the exam covers Cloud Collaboration technologies. Before we meet again, take some time to browse through the free CLAUTO Study Materials available on the Cisco Learning Network, which will help you solidify today’s ChatOps focus on building your first Webex bot.

Source: cisco.com

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Building Hybrid Work Experiences: Details Matter

The Shift From Remote Work to a New Hybrid Work Environment

It’s exciting to see more organizations start to make the shift from remote work to a new hybrid work environment, but it’s a transition that comes with a new set of questions and challenges. How many people will return to the office, and what will that environment look like? Increasingly, we’re hearing that teams are feeling fatigued and disconnected – what tools can help to solve for that? And perhaps most importantly, how can we ensure that employees continuing to work remotely have the same connected and inclusive experience as those that return to the office?

When we think about delivering positive employee experiences, it’s the details that matter. This month, we’re rolling out new Webex features that solve for a few challenges that might be overlooked and yet play an important role in the new hybrid working model.

Give More and Get More From Your Meeting Experiences

Whether in the office or working remotely, no one wants to sit in meeting after meeting listening to a presenter drone on. Or worse, participating in a video meeting where there are so many talking heads and content being shared that you just don’t know where to focus. Making meetings more engaging is important in the world of hybrid work.

We’re expanding our Webex custom layouts functionality to include greater host controls, resulting in a more personalized and engaging meeting experience. As a meeting host or co-host, you have the ability to hide participants who are not on video, bringing greater focus to facial expressions and interactions with video users. Using the slider feature, you are able to show all participants on screen, or focus on just a few. And now hosts and co-hosts can curate and synchronize the content and speakers you want your attendees to focus on, and then push that view to all participants. This allows you to set a common “stage” and establish a more engaging meeting experience for all.

Setting the stage and sharing great content is one half of the equation – but wouldn’t it be helpful to know what your audience thinks about your meeting as well? Yesterday we announced the close of our acquisition of Slido, which brings best-in-class audience interaction capabilities to the Webex platform. With the ability to crowdsource questions, launch polls and quizzes, and solicit real-time feedback from your audience, the meeting experience just became a lot more interesting and valuable to both those hosting and those attending.

Work More Efficiently with Personalized Webex Work Modes

Your morning routine might start with a review of your meeting schedule, or checking unread messages. Or maybe you spend the majority of your time on calls. As a Webex user, you now have the flexibility to modify settings to default to the work mode that’s most important to you, allowing you to work your way more efficiently. And because all work modes come together seamlessly on the Webex platform, you can transition between messaging, calling and meeting with ease.

If you’re like me, you might rely on your message inbox as a To Do list that reminds you where to prioritize your time. To better support this workstyle preference, Webex now offers the ability to easily mark a message as unread, even if you’ve already read it. This visual reminder allows you to work efficiently and effectively – keeping up to speed on conversations, while ensuring that action items don’t fall off your radar.

Reimagining the Workplace

When it comes to planning for a safe and successful return to the office, business leaders are faced with new challenges large and small – everything from reconfiguring workspaces for a hybrid workforce to ensuring that shared surfaces and devices are kept clean and sanitized.

To ensure inclusive collaboration between employees in the office and those working remotely, we’re making it easier for all meeting attendees to be seen and heard. The Webex Room Kit Mini now offers a more powerful 5x digital zoom camera and optimized audio via internal microphones, providing clear audio up to 4 meters away. And the Webex Room Panorama is now configurable for low ceiling height and features flexible placement of content screens, enabling a wider variety of workspaces to support boardroom-style meeting experiences.

And talk about attention to details: Webex now enables easy sanitation of shared devices, with features like medical-grade, alcohol-resistant removable covers for phones and a wipe-down metal grill option on Webex Room Kit Mini devices.

Source: cisco.com

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Real-Time Translations, Improved Search Performance and More in the Webex App March Update

Webex App March Update

As the saying goes, March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. So does the Cisco Webex app … at least the lion part. In this month’s release, we bring you the much-anticipated king of features: real-time translations in meetings. In messaging, we deliver a 4x improvement in Webex search performance. In Webex Calling, you’ll see key feature enhancements for media optimization, and in Unified CM, new call recording services among other exciting developments.

Meetings in Webex

◉ In late March, Webex will begin a trial of real-time translation* – from English to 100+ languages. That means, non-native English speakers and/or hearing-impaired participants can choose closed captioning translation from English to one of the 108 additional languages supported. Real-time translation aids understanding and creates a more inclusive meeting, where language no longer be a barrier to great collaboration. Imagine the impact real-time translation could have on a virtual global classroom or a multinational company all-hands where better understanding could result in greater engagement. And we have deeply embedded this capability into the Webex UI, so the user experience will be familiar and effortless. See it in action:

Enterprise customers can reach out to their Cisco sales rep to sign up for the real-time translation trial. The trial will also be enabled on Webex.com with some restrictions. We will open the trial more broadly in May when the feature becomes generally available.

◉ Another long-awaited feature: Q&A is now supported in Webex Meetings. Together with previously released features – such as breakout sessions, co-hosts, and hard mute – you now have all the functionality you need to have a great training experience in Webex Meetings. The Q&A capability allows attendees to post questions in the Q&A panel with answers provided by the host and co-hosts. Multiple co-hosts can be assigned to the meeting, so you can have as many Q&A panelists as needed to conduct a highly effective training session. Teachers and corporate trainers now have powerful tools to conduct interactive and effective training sessions in Webex Meetings.

◉ For scheduled meetings, we’ve improved the attendee join experience in the event they join before a meeting starts. Rather than having to hang up and dial back in, they can now wait in the pre-meeting lobby until the host arrives and even notify the host that they are waiting. This feature is already available for Webex Personal Room meetings, so this is making the experience consistent across Webex meeting types.

Messaging in Webex

With a 400 percent improvement in our search performance time, you will now enjoy lightning-fast results when you search for key words in Webex messaging. Webex will return near instantaneous results, which will make you more efficient than ever before. No more endless scrolling through spaces to find that particular message. You’ll also be able to narrow your search and find messages instantly with the addition of In: (In a space) and From: (From a contact) modifiers. These can be selected from the advanced search menu or typed straight into your search box. Or, speed things up with new keyboard shortcuts:

Command + F: Open search bar

Command + F +Shift: Open search in space

◉ Viewing, sending and navigating files are some of the most frequent actions we take every day as we collaborate. With this in mind, we have made major updates to the content tab including a new ‘list’ view option for reviewing files in chronological order, as well and the ability to drag and drop files into this area to share in the space. This enables you to keep all your project assets easily accessible in a space that is well organized.

◉ Team spaces are great when a team project needs to be broken down into smaller sub-groups, allowing more efficient and precise collaboration. Originally, moderators only had control over the ‘General’ space. Now moderators have full control over all spaces within a Team. This gives them extra control and additional features such as the ability to add and remove participants and control the contents of a space including deleting other users’ messages.

◉ When working across multiple spaces, it can be easy to get distracted and forget what you were working on. We have now added ‘forward and back’ arrows on the Webex app header to help guide you through your spaces and keep track of where you were.

Calling in Webex

◉ Making calls has never been easier in Webex. In the desktop client, you’ll now be able to input the phone number in the global search bar and press ‘Enter’ to make the call. You no longer need to navigate your mouse to click the audio or video call buttons. Or speed things up even more with new keyboard shortcuts:

Audio call:

Option + Command + C

Control + Alt + C

Video call:

Option + Command + U

Control + Alt + V

◉ Webex app with Webex Calling: Media optimization (ICE) allows calls between the Webex app to keep media on premise. This helps businesses decrease bandwidth usage, reduce latency, and improve quality performance. No extra hardware or configuration is required. Backend support will launch by the end of March, and when integrated into the Webex app the first week of April, ICE will automatically improve call performance.

◉ Webex app with Unified CM: More controls are coming to call recording. If you’re set up by your administrator to record calls, you can now start and stop recordings as needed during your call, providing flexibility and greater control. If the call is being recorded, the recording continues if you move the call to another device, merge the call with another active call, or make it a conference call. A visual indicator light will be visible to let you know when a call is being recorded.

Webex App Device Integration

◉ In situations where proximity is not available, you can now pair to a device using a 9-character code. For instance, if you’re on a guest network, simply get the code from the device and enter it into the Webex app device panel. Once paired to the device, you can use the device for audio/video, wireless screen share, and device control enabling you to be able to work the way you want with the device of your choice.

◉ Closed captioning is now available on Webex devices for Webex Assistant for Meetings subscribers. Hosts were already able to turn on Webex Assistant for Meetings from their devices. Now, participants and hosts using Webex devices will also be able to see closed captioning, making the experience more aligned across Webex apps and devices.

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How Can Webex Control Hub Help You, the IT Admin?

A Day in the Life of the IT Admin

8:50 AM (EST): It’s the start of a typical workday, and you’ve been notified that users are having trouble joining meetings and experiencing poor video quality. You’re an IT admin at an enterprise in the middle of a large product launch, and critical virtual meetings across your leadership teams are reporting technical issues with their meetings.

As IT admins, we’ve all been through periods when the services we provide are experiencing higher than normal workloads — the type of scenario we’ve planned for. But layer on top of that a forced remote work environment brought on by a pandemic and the scenario expands, requiring additional resources, expansion of our collaboration footprint, and additional capacity. We’ve all had to pivot to the new normal.

8:53 AM (EST): You set out to tackle the issue as you normally would, but now, with Webex Control Hub, you have visibility in real-time into what’s happening across your collaboration ecosystem, along with actionable insights as to how to address it.

Digging deeper into Control Hub, you can see the dramatic increase in the total number of meetings — a trend you’ve been watching for the past month as your firm ramped up preparations for the launch.

Dig in further, you can confirm a significant increase in the number of participants. You see poor video quality indications and that colleagues in the London area are having trouble joining meetings. Plus, diving into a specific meeting that ended 20 minutes ago, you can see that your VP of product marketing, based outside London, has significant issues with their device.

Diagnosis? You first discover that their Desk Pro doesn’t have the latest patch installed. Second, after verifying with ThousandEyes that VP’s internet service provider is having issues, you can confirm the network issue on the provider’s network status pages.

8:57 AM (EST): Armed with this near real-time insight, you can act! You quickly notify the VP of product marketing that your team is remotely installing the latest firmware patch for the Desk Pro. Plus, you communicate that their provider is aware of their network traffic issue and working to resolve it within the hour.

9:37 AM (EST): You receive notification that your VP’s firmware has been updated and that the internet provider has resolved their issue — all in time for a critical meeting marketing has with analysts and media at the top of the hour. You set a Webex Notification in Control Hub to track your VP’s meetings so that you can get an email alert in case you VP has any media quality issues.

Reducing IT’s Response Time While Empowering Long-Term Planning

Webex Control Hub received a significant revamp. With an improved user experience design, faster load times, trending charts with summary statistics, and contextual filtering capabilities, gaining visibility into the performance of your organization’s collaboration has become easier and in near real time. The result is a dramatic decrease in your team’s response time.

At the same time, with Control Hub, the partnership between your team and the business is bolstered by real insights into adoption and performance. As your organization looks to the future and planning for hybrid work environments is being debated, a better understanding of trends becomes a vital tool in planning for success. You’re able to identify gaps and weaknesses, highlight opportunities to improve, and document models that work well.

9:48 AM (EST): You continue with your morning, reviewing incident reports and monitoring systems. All services are stable, the engine is humming, and you’re free to move on to the next part of your day. You spend the following 30 minutes preparing for your meeting with the head of HR, where you’ll be reviewing the latest version of an internal HR monitoring tool. This tool provides a top-level view of the company’s team collaboration and meeting trends, leveraging data from Webex through Control Hub APIs and other data sources.

Webex Control Hub: An Essential IT Admin Tool

At Webex, we’re working to make sure Control Hub increases your ability to monitor and manage your collaboration experiences. We understand the role IT admins play in managing these complex ecosystems and how you participate in the planning for new work models, growth, and employee engagement.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan Now Includes an all New Comprehensive and Cost-Effective Offer for Education

At Cisco we are pleased to kick off 2021 with an exciting update to the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan that continues our mission to drive experiences that are 10x better than in-person interactions, help organizations collaborate seamlessly, and transform employee and customer experiences to power an inclusive future for all.

The World of the Classroom has Changed and Webex has Changed with it

To address the changing needs of our Education users, we created the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan for Education, to be a single platform for all education collaboration technology, regardless of deployment type.  Cisco Collaboration provides schools with comprehensive features and capabilities they need today to support the needs of their administrators, teachers, and students through a cost-effective offer.

It is more vital than ever to keep students engaged and learning in today’s remote school environment. We continue to expand, simplify and differentiate by providing a complete education solution to our customers with an all-new feature rich experience.

There are several new features of Cisco’s Collaboration Flex Plan for Education offering:

◉ Enhanced Secure Messaging for all students and faculty.

◉ Support for Cisco on-premises and Cloud Calling

◉ Webex Meetings with new powerful AI capabilities such as gesture recognition

◉ Unlimited storage for all classroom recordings (archiving included at no charge for one year)

◉ Webex Assistant including closed captioning

◉ Extended Security Solutions

◉ And more!

Cisco offers the most comprehensive and cost-effective collaboration solution for education in the industry.I am extremely excited about the new and improved offer for Education and look forward to sharing future enhancements to the Cisco Collaboration offers throughout the year.

Learn more about our Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan for Education

Source: cisco.com

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Your Journey to the All-New Webex

All-New Webex

At WebexOne, we launched new programs to support and work through how current Meetings and Jabber on-premise customers can update to the all-new Webex.

Over the past year, we all experienced how the workplace fundamentally changed, and how connecting with our work colleagues, regardless of where or how you work, is vital to continuity. Today, users need the capabilities to work remotely, collaborate with their teams effortlessly and work together regardless of time zones. Workloads must come together to allow for this seamless collaboration experience.

These new update programs outline steps for how customers can update from Jabber on-premise IM/P to secure Cloud Messaging and move from a standalone Meetings experience to a full modern collaboration solution, all contained within a single application.

For those customers who wish to remain with Jabber on-premise Messaging and in a standalone Meetings application we will continue to offer both these solutions.

Supporting Your Journey

Whether you are updating from Jabber or Meetings, the team at Webex has developed supporting sites to guide you on your journey. Let’s jump in to unpack what is available for you.

Deployment Steps

On these sites, we have published a detailed journey map outlining the steps to update from Jabber or Meetings to Webex. Some steps are mandatory while others will be optional, depending on your organizational needs you can choose which steps are right for you, and our technical guides and deployment documents will support the steps through the update to Webex.

Technical Workshops

Webex experts will lead multiple live technical enablement workshops walking through each step on the update journey. You will gain deep insights from our subject matter experts, who will be on hand to answer your questions throughout the workshops. We appreciate that it can be difficult to take time out of a busy day to join live sessions, so we are recording all workshops and will make them available in short, snackable videos for you to dive into on your own time. 

Gaining Analytical Insight

To help with your update, we have outlined details on how you can use Cloud Connected UC to gain deep analytic insights to your existing on-premise usage. These insights will provide you with the right views to help drive decision making and build a timeline for a move to Cloud.

When you land on Webex, you will see that by using Webex Control Hub as single-pane-of-glass to manage your collaboration portfolio you can gain fresh insights into how your users adopt these innovative solutions to increase productivity and get more done quicker.

End User Adoption

As you begin to rollout Webex to your organization, we recognize that you will want to communicate the update to your users. We have built launch kits to support this announcement to your teams. These packs include project blueprints and digital campaign assets such as email templates, quick start guides, videos & product images. Along with our live adoption masterclasses, you will have all you need to have a successful adoption of Webex.

IT & User Community

Underlying all our support, is a thriving and active IT and User Community. Here you will find the means to engage with and learn directly from Webex experts. You can also collaborate with your peers, hear from thought leaders and learn about exciting new announcements from the Webex team.

Bringing it All Together

By combining Meetings, Calling, Messaging, Whiteboarding, File Sharing, and with our award-winning Room and Desk Devices, Webex offers all the essentials for getting work done together, faster, and easier than ever before.

With enterprise calling backed by Unified Communications Manager, your users will enjoy the same rich calling experience as in Jabber whilst using the calling infrastructure already deployed within your organization. Meetings customers moving to the new Webex, will continue to have all the capabilities and with pre- and post-meetings experience, there will never be a moment to miss a conversation.

Find Out More

Find all the details on these program on our dedicated sites supporting both the Jabber and Meetings journeys to Webex. These pages will provide you with everything you need to get started and to make the move to your new all-in-one Collaboration solution as easy as possible.

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