If you’re a user of Cisco Webex Meetings, you will have seen that an update was recently released, Webex Meetings 39.10! Cisco regularly issues these updates to their collaboration platforms in order to consistently upgrade the number of features that are available to users. This is one of the reasons they are ranked highest for meeting solutions in the annual Gartner report. In this article, we will look at the new Webex Meetings update and breakdown the most interesting new changes.

With the Webex Meetings 39.10 update, the mobile versions of Webex Meetings will begin supporting Mobile Device Management or MDM. This is great as it allows site administrators to create automatic preferences and settings for their users. Hence, users will not have to go to the settings menu when they install the app to customise their preferences. This makes mobile app deployment within an organisation a far easier and streamlined process.

One of the example settings that an administrator can choose is whether the camera on your device is activated or deactivated when you first join a meeting. Without this new change, all users would have to go and manually set this themselves. But now site admins can set a preference for everyone when they log in.

This new feature is for Samsung users only. Samsung has built a capability into their devices called DeX which lets users hook up their phone to a monitor to create a PC-like experience. The Webex Meetings mobile app now supports this feature and allows you to easily switch between your mobile screen and the monitor with ease. Users are also able to share their screen to the monitor via HDMI in DeX dual mode.

Simple mode was a new feature to iOS in the last update but Android will also have access to the popular new feature when they upgrade to Webex Meetings 39.10 which many will be happy about.

To put it ‘simply’, Simple Mode takes the mute/unmute button and makes it the largest thing on the screen which allows users to rapidly mute and unmute themselves. This was designed to help people who may be multitasking during a meeting and need to quickly unmute the microphone to say something. It’s also a great feature for people who drive whilst participating in meetings and Cisco has utilised the motion detection capabilities in Android devices to automatically go into Simple Mode when the device thinks you’re driving. This is not yet a feature on the iOS version.

Simple mode can be activated by swiping right on the meeting or by pressing a button in the overflow menu of the centralised control bar. While in Simple Mode, video and screen sharing is disabled to help you save battery life.

Before the Webex Meetings 39.10 update, you were able to use either your front or rear-facing camera when sending video to a meeting. With this update comes a change that allows participants to use both at the same time. Both videos appear in the same panel with the smaller one sitting on top of the other. This could be an extremely useful tool for many different purposes. For example if you were in a design team and wanted to show how a prototype was looking while speaking to your team simultaneously.

Please note this feature requires your device to be on iOS 13 or higher.

This point isn’t technically a new feature, but we thought we would include it because it will probably have the biggest effect on your everyday meetings than any of the new features! Before Webex Meetings 39.10, if there was a blip in the network which caused the video stream to be interrupted, often the platform would struggle to regain the quality resolution we are so used to with Webex Meetings.

With 39.10 comes a change that has substantially mitigated this problem which is fantastic to see! It used to take minutes to recover quality after a network issue; now it takes just a few seconds.

You can a full list of the changes made in the Webex 39.10 update here.