For those of us that have been around conferencing and collaboration for some time, the video pre-view images that used to be available on the previous generation “Codians” have been sorely missed. It is therefore great to be re-introducing video snapshots to the Activity page.
Please note that snapshots are enabled on CMS via a CMS license key; these can be purchased from Cisco. Once you have the CMS license key installed, enable “snapshots” on the People CoApp at the UX Profile when logged in as an Administrator.
Please also note that Snapshots are “expensive” in the terms of CMS resource consumption and should only be used sparingly. We have produced an extensive test report and will make it available as a whitepaper shortly after releasing 3.11. The report shows how the snap-shot functionality performs under different CMS call loading levels.
As a general rule, please work on limiting snap-shot usage to 25 participants across all Operators with snap-shot visibility enabled. VQ’s implementation of snapshots caches the snap-shot data to minimize the loading on CMS.
The snapshot is requested via the three ellipses button on the right-hand side of a participant row…
Operators can do all of the following on a single screen….
• View and manage up to 50 active Spaces/meetings
• Pane Placement/Layout Management
• Home coApp and “Webex style” Join functionality for Spaces and Meetings
• Local User support
• Auto gain control at the participant level
• Participant labelling and bandwidth control when placing outbound calls
• Move participants between Spaces and change participant roles
• Add or remove participants
• Mute or unmute audio
• Alter video layouts and user importance
• View statistics
• Dial DTMF tones
• Create new Spaces
• Lobby; admit participants individually or all-at-once into calls
• Call lock; once locked, any new participants are held in the lobby
• Active Speaker
VQ Conference Manager gives your call operators precise control over how in-call video appears.
For any live call, the Pane Placement feature enables an operator to:
Define the video layout
Specify which participant’s video appears in each pane
Reserve panes for participants who haven’t yet joined the call
If participants join the call with, for example, an IP address, they may need to be identified with something more meaningful. This can be done with Participant Re-labelling.
On Spaces where you may want people to limit access to people scheduling calls, on the Space with Space Locked a Space can be locked until a call is scheduled on it and the call is due to start. Once the call is finished, the Space will be locked again, until the next call is scheduled and due to start.
Transfer users from one meeting to another, and ensure they’re assigned the correct role in their new call.
When you’re running a white-glove ‘concierge’ conferencing service, your operators can move individual or multiple users between meetings, or between a waiting lobby Space and the main conference.
If the destination meeting Space has more than one role-type, the operator can set which role the moved participants will have. They can also set the bandwidth for that individual.
Once the move is complete, VQ Conference Manager automatically expands the destination Space on the operator’s Activity screen, to show that the individuals have been moved successfully.
Note that limitations in the Cisco Meeting Server API mean individuals using the Cisco Meeting App or WebRTC client cannot be moved between meetings in this way. If this applies to you, we suggest you consider switching to the Webex Teams Client or the Cisco Meeting Server Web App, both of which are supported. Move Participant functionality requires that the Endpoints are registered with Cisco Unified Communications Manager (“CUCM”).
VQ Conference Manager empowers operators to monitor and manage multiple calls, directly from their Activity screen.
For each live conference, they can see:
• Participants in the call and lobby/waiting room
• Who is speaking (or where any noise that’s disrupting the call is coming from)
• Whether it’s being recorded
• Real-time statistics for each participant
Without leaving the Activity screen, the operator can:
Add users to a call
Remove users from a call
Move users to other calls
Change overall video layout
Lock a Space
For one or more users, they can:
Mute or unmute audio
Adjust the audio gain
Activate or deactivate video
Alter the name label beneath their video
Set importance
Define which pane their video appears in (pane placement)
