Over the last couple of months, Cisco has been rolling out some big changes to its Webex platforms. However, some of the changes that can get overlooked are the capabilities that are added to the Webex Control Hub as the end-user never sees them.

This article picks out the most useful major changes to the Webex Control Hub and explains how they can improve management of your organisation’s collaboration. If you need any assistance in activating these features, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

You can now enable Call Recording for specific users so that all their incoming and outgoing calls (desk phones, analogue telephone adapters, and Webex Calling app) are recorded automatically. You can also choose whether to allow those users to pause and resume recordings.

Webex teams now has the ability to desktop share without having to initiate a voice all video call. 

Cisco have improved the settings available on the Webex Share within the Webex Control Hub. You can now choose whether file-sharing restrictions are applied to annotations and whiteboards. For example, you can prevent people from downloading, previewing, and uploading files but allow them to use whiteboards and create annotations. 

Jabber and Webex Teams are both instant messaging platforms offered by Cisco. Organisations have the option to use either based on their use cases and security preferences. However, some organisations use both platforms in different areas of the business and previously this led to difficulty in tracking the analytics of both platforms in the same place.

In a recent update, Cisco has made Jabber’s analytics data available within the Webex Admin Control Hub. You can now view the total number of messages sent, the total number of calls made, a breakdown of Jabber client versions etc. in the same place you see all your Webex Teams analytics data. 

Here you can see a small example of the different analytics reports that are now available.

Cisco recently added the ability to remotely reboot Webex Room Devices from wherever you are accessing the Webex Control Hub. This allows admins to perform basic maintenance on a Webex Room device if users are having an issue with it, without leaving their desk.

Digital signage is a great feature of Cisco Collaboration products but previously could be strenuous to set up if you were responsible for a large number of devices. Cisco has now introduced tags that allows you to group multiple devices together (based on location for example) and activate Digital Signage on them all simultaneously instead of one-by-one. 

Here’s a video tutorial of how to activate Digital Signage on a Webex Room Kit.

Cisco has also made improvements that will aid your security efforts when it comes to Collaboration. There is now support for Extended Security Pack in Control Hub which allows your organisation to protect users by scanning all file uploads for Trojan attacks, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats. The administrator has the option to enable anti-malware scanning for files uploaded in Webex Teams.

Webex Calling administrators can now configure these features right in WebEx Admin Control Hub as opposed to the Calling Admin portal.

You can now rename Webex sites in the Webex Control Hub. This was not previously possible and it’s a great feature that’s been added. 

Within the Webex Control Hub, you can now see when a participant changes their network connection, microphone, or camera during a meeting, and if a device is connected through Video Mesh Connector.

Specifically Analytics and Resource Usage, you can now access two categories of reports to help you manage your Video Mesh deployment called Interactive reports that provide up to 3 months of data and Recent resource usage reports which provide a near-real-time view of the activity in your organisation.

Below you can see the “Partcipants by Join Method” report which shows a breakdown of exactly how every user joined a meeting.

The Meetings Analytics page has gone through a complete change for the better where Cisco provide richer insights that make it easier to drive adoption and dive into key reports with less time wasted trying to see the important information. 

Features can be enabled as organisation-wide setting or user-level which always overrides.