There was a time when if you wanted to learn more about Webex, a simple search with your good friend Google would give you a pretty good idea. But recently Cisco has made some changes to its marketing strategy, extending the Webex family to include Webex Meetings, Webex Teams, Webex Room series, and Webex Share.
Just between you and I, there are many useful, and dare I say even ‘wow’ features available, which will make your working life easier and even a bit more fun. I will talk about that in detail in another day, but today I wanted to address the common question; What’s the difference between Webex Meetings and Webex Teams, and what should I use when?
Cisco Webex is the leading enterprise solution for video conferencing, webinars, and screen sharing. Web conferencing, online meeting, cloud calling and equipment. Thanks for downloading Cisco Webex Teams. Verify that users have activated accounts in Control Hub, and they should be successfully registered to Unified Communications Manager or Webex Calling for making calls. Make sure your users have the Webex app. Make sure you have Administrator rights for Microsoft Teams. Make sure users' phone numbers are updated in the Azure Active Directory. WebEx Teams also allows you to share files in a chat with your team, and you can refer to these files at any point in time. Microsoft Teams allows for files to be shared, saved and organized. You can also work collaboratively on Word Documents, or PowerPoint documents (for example) in the app. Resources to help you get the most out of Webex - for every role, industy, and team. Webex workspaces. Personal offices. 1 Huddle spaces. 1-5 Co-creation areas. 2-12 Meeting rooms. 4-20 Special purpose rooms. 24-150 Join a meeting.
What is Webex Meetings?
Webex Meetings is a virtual meeting place where you can meet in real-time from your web browser, the app on your computer, or even access it on your mobile. This gives one consistent experience, providing options to connect easily wherever you may be. Webex Meetings is globally available, secure and made to optimise bandwidth, to reduce delays so that everyone has a good experience no matter where they are in the world, which I can vouch for having delivered global projects using Webex Meetings.
Webex Meetings gives you HD video with customizable layouts making a good alternative to face to face meetings but without the travel. It keeps teams singing from the same hymn sheet with the help of screen or application sharing, get creative with the Whiteboard, and the list goes on. Basically, you can get stuff done quickly and efficiently using Webex Meetings.
What is Webex Teams?
Formerly known as Cisco Spark, Webex Teams is an app for continuous teamwork with video meetings, group messaging, file sharing and whiteboarding. Webex Teams goes beyond the meeting itself, after all, meetings are just one part of a team journey. It aims to integrate the whole collaboration experience before, during and after meetings.
All this collaboration and action happens within Spaces. You can create Spaces and add people who share the same interest or are on the same project team as you.
Check out Stu’s blog explaining exactly what Webex Teams is
What is the difference between Webex Meetings and Webex Teams?
This question is often asked by people familiar with Webex Meetings, who are then asked to try Webex Teams. As is the typical experience, new tools and products are launched with the drop of an email with little to explain the purpose and benefits to the people. This creates a confused and unsure workforce.
Traditionally Webex Meetings is used for all types of meetings from team meetings scheduled with an invitation, to a 1:1 ad-hoc meeting where a meeting link is shared. Within Webex Teams you can also schedule meetings or schedule from your email calendar. But it’s even easier to start ad-hoc or on the fly meetings with people.
I thought it may be clearer to create a small table showing the feature comparison.
Webex feature comparison
I have a couple of recommendations from my own experience using both Webex Meetings and Webex Teams:
Scheduled, client or more formal meetings
I would advise using Webex Meetings, it’s easy to schedule and amend, there are a number of ways your attendees can join. Maybe they have low bandwidth so the option to dial into the meeting would be perfect for them.
Ad-hoc, 1:1 or internal team meetings
I would suggest using Webex Teams in these instances. It’s my favourite feature and the simplest way ever to start a meeting. It’s even easier than making a phone call and has been my biggest ‘WOW’ to date. We use it numerous times a day, see for yourself give it a try.
Presentation delivery
So, Webex Meetings wins here, you can load your documents before your attendee have even joined and annotate together. If you are using the Whiteboard, however, Webex Teams wins simply by saving your Whiteboard to your space for everyone to see, edit and review. Your Whiteboard in Webex Meetings is gone and lost forever unless you remember to save it to your desktop and email it to everyone.
Continue the conversation: persistent chat
Webex Teams is the definite winner here. Within your spaces, you can start a conversation before, during or after your meeting, keeping the conversation alive and everyone on track.
Host privileges
Webex Meetings allows for a more professional type of meeting and what I mean by that is, you can mute all attendees on entry so no disturbance if someone is late to your meeting or eating crisps. You can pin the presenter video so everyone is focussed on the message being delivered.
Files and documents
A great feature in Webex Teams, which has saved my bacon a few times is, all files and documents shared are stored in your space and are easily searchable. Taking the stress and frustration away when time is of the essence.
My Recommendation: Webex Meetings or Webex Teams?
Webex Meetings and Webex Teams are both great at what they do, the right one for you very much depends on what you want to do with it. Establishing your business drivers early will help you design use cases that work for your people. And, of course, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Webex Teams and Webex Meetings can work in perfect harmony together if those use cases have already been established and clearly communicated.
Leaving change to chance never works
Employees won’t use your new digital workplace tools if you don’t tell them why and teach them how. Future Worx gets everyone using new tools in the best ways by raising awareness, revealing the value and showing how to work smarter in this digital age. They’ll be happier and more effective. You’ll transform the business.
Get in touch to learn more about how Future Worx can transform your workplace.
-->Microsoft Teams Rooms devices support a one-touch experience for joining third-party online meetings, also referred to as Direct guest join. When enabled, you can use a Teams Rooms device to join meetings hosted on Cisco WebEx and Zoom just as easily as you can join meetings hosted in Microsoft Teams.
Before you can join third-party meetings from a Teams Rooms device, you need to do the following:
Webex For Teams
- Configure the Teams Rooms device's Exchange Online room mailbox to process invites for third-party meetings.
- Make sure your organization doesn't have any policies that would prevent you from connecting to third-party meeting services.
- Configure your Teams Rooms devices to allow third-party meetings.
The following sections show you how to do each of these steps.
Step 1: Allow calendar invite processing for third-party meetings
The first thing you need to do to enable a one-touch join experience from a Team Rooms device is set the calendar processing rules for the device's Exchange Online room mailbox. The room mailbox needs to allow external meetings and keep the message body and subject so it can see the URL needed to join the third-party meeting. To set these room mailbox options using the Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet, do the following:
Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell. For more information, see Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell with Basic authentication or Connect to Exchange Online PowerShell using multi-factor authentication, depending on your authentication method.
Get the User Principal Name (UPN) of the room mailbox if you don't know it by running the following command:
Find the name of the room mailbox associated with your Teams Rooms device and make note of its UPN.
After you find the room mailbox's UPN, run the following command. Replace
<UserPrincipalName>with the room mailbox's UPN:
Learn more about Exchange Online PowerShell.
Step 2: Configure Office 365 Threat Protection and link rewrite
Webex Teams For Mac
To enable the one-touch join experience, meeting join link information from the third-party meeting needs to be present and readable in the meeting invite. If your organization uses the Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection Safe Links feature, or if you use a third-party solution that scans all incoming and outgoing URLs for threats, it may change the meeting join URLs and make the meeting unrecognizable by the Teams Rooms device. To make sure this doesn't happen, you need to add the third-party meeting service's URLs to the ATP Safe Links 'do not rewrite' list or the third-party URL rewrite exception list.
To add third-party meeting service URLs to the ATP Safe Links 'do not rewrite' list, follow the steps in Set up a custom do-not-rewrite URLs list using ATP Safe Links. If you use a third-party solution, refer to the instructions for that solution to add URLs to its URL rewrite exception list.
Here are some example entries that you may need to add to your ATP Safe Links 'do not rewrite' list or third-party URL rewrite exception list:
- Cisco WebEx
*.webex.com* - Zoom
*.zoom.us*,*.zoom.com*,*.zoomgov.com*
For a complete list of URLs to add to your ATP Safe Links 'do not rewrite' list or third-party URL rewrite exception list, contact the third-party meeting service provider you want to accept meeting invites from.
Caution
Only add URLs that you trust to your ATP Safe Links 'do not rewrite' list or third-party URL rewrite exception list.
Step 3: Enable third-party meetings on device
The last step you need to do is allow each Teams Rooms device to join third-party meetings. Third-party meetings require a username and email address to join them. If the username and email address that you need to use is different than the device's room mailbox, you need to add them to your device. You can do this in the device settings or in the XML config file.
Use device settings
To configure the Teams Rooms device using its touchscreen, do the following:
- On the Microsoft Teams Rooms device, select More ....
- Select Settings, and then enter the device administrator username and password.
- Go to the Meetings tab and select Cisco WebEx, Zoom, or both.
- If you want to join meetings with the username and email address associated with the room mailbox, select Join with room info.
- If you want to join meetings with an alternate username and email address, select Join with custom info and enter username and email address you'd like to use.
- Select Save and exit. Your device will restart.
Use the SkypeSettings.xml configuration file
The following settings can be added to the SkypeSettings.xml file located in C:UsersSkypeAppDataLocalPackagesMicrosoft.SkypeRoomSystem_8wekyb3d8bbweLocalState. For more information about the SkypeSettings.xml file, see Manage a Microsoft Teams Rooms console settings remotely with an XML configuration file.
To enable Cisco WebEx meetings, set the WebExMeetingsEnabled XML element to True, as follows.
To enable Zoom meetings, set the ZoomMeetingsEnabled XML element to True, as follows.
Webex Teams For Vdi
You can optionally specify a custom username and email address to join third-party meetings using the following XML elements. If the values you provide aren't valid, the Teams Rooms device will default to use room mailbox username and email address.
Note
To join Cisco WebEx meeting from a Teams Rooms device, the Cisco meeting needs to be hosted using Cisco WebEx web application version WBS 40.7 or later.