VQ Conference Manager’s lobby or waiting room feature enables the person managing a call to decide when participants are admitted.
This provides additional security and control where required, and is ideal for managing webinars, all-hands meetings and calls with external organizations.
Where the person managing the call activates the lobby feature, all participants joining the meeting are placed into the waiting area. The individual managing the call can then use the VQ Conference Manager web portal to:
• Admit specific individuals to the call
• Admit everyone in the lobby to the call
• Unlock the meeting, to allow all in the lobby, plus future joiners, directly into the call
• Mute or unmute audio for individual participants in the lobby
• Enable or disable video for individual participants in the lobby
Noise from other meeting participants can distract from the main speaker. Whether it’s a barking dog, a PA announcement or simply the wind blowing into someone’s microphone, it can drown out the person currently speaking.
VQ Conference Manager’s active speaker feature helps call operators address this.
For every live call on your Cisco Meeting Server platform, your operators can see…
Who is currently speaking (or where noise is coming from)
Who spoke recently (or where recent noise came from)
From the same page, operators can then mute individual participants, if necessary. Operators can also dynamically sort call participants, so that active speakers are always at the top of the list. This is particularly valuable for operators overseeing calls with large numbers of participants.
Alter a user’s permissions while a meeting is underway.
In some conferences, you’ll want to change people’s roles during the meeting.
In a managed all-hands call with large numbers of participants, for example, you’ll have most people in a view- and listen-only role for much of the time. However, you may then need to switch specific individuals to full video and two-way audio to ask questions, and then switch them back again.
This involves temporarily changing their role, which the operator overseeing the meeting can do from their Activity screen.
Note that limitations in the Cisco Meeting Server API mean individuals using the Cisco Meeting App or WebRTC client cannot have their roles changed 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”).
Real-time performance data
For each live call, an operator can view real-time performance statistics for every participant.
This includes:
• Tx and Rx jitter
• Tx and Rx bandwidth use
• Tx and Rx packet loss
• Tx framerate
Users and operators can schedule one-off or recurring calls.
VQ Conference Manager Web Portal
Users and operators can schedule one-off or recurring calls via the VQ Conference Manager web portal.
Calls scheduled in this way can either be in one of a user’s always-available meeting Spaces, or in a one-off (Temporary) Space.
Recurring Meetings on Temporary or named Spaces can be scheduled with each meeting instance having its own PIN/Passcode.
Time-limited Spaces with their own PINs add essential security. They ensure someone from a previous call cannot stay on the line for a subsequent call, nor dial in at a later time or to a subsequent meeting in a series using the PIN/passcode they were issued previously.
For organizations holding conferences across both their Cisco Meeting Server(s) and other systems – such as audio conferencing platforms – DTMF tones enable this bridging.
The CMS can dial out to the external system, and consequently input an access PIN when prompted, via DTMF. These tones are pre-configured for a given call by an operator.
VQ Conference Manager enables you to display text-based messages to participants in a video conference.
Currently, these messages are pre-programmed and automated, based on a set of rules your operators define. An example use case would be to notify participants on a time-limited conference that their meeting is about to end, to avoid people being cut off without warning.
While very large conferencing systems demand self-service access, many organizations run a managed, or ‘white-glove’ concierge service. Here calls are typically scheduled and managed on users behalf by one or more operators.
Self-service and concierge services can be run side-by-side or self-service/concierge only.
For your managed service, assign one or more operators to specific customers, regions or groups of users. Operators can then schedule calls for their users, and manage all calls for which they’re responsible from a single screen.
Sometimes, you need to get multiple individuals on the line together quickly, perhaps to respond to an incident. VQ Conference Manager’s Reactive Calls/Blast Dial capability enables this.
Starting a Reactive Calls call immediately dials out to a pre-configured list of devices (soft clients, phones or video appliances). This can include users on any device your Cisco Meeting Server is configured to dial.
A common call type is the so-called ‘all-hands’ or ‘town hall’, where a small number of speakers presents to a bigger audience. This will typically be facilitated by a chair or moderator, and managed behind-the-scenes by an operator.
VQ Conference Manager includes an all-hands Space template as standard, which includes the following roles:
• Panel member (for the speakers)
• Moderator (to facilitate the meeting)
• Audience (all muted as standard)
Operators can move users in and out of the all-hands call at any time, or temporarily change someone’s role from listen-only to full video and two-way audio, to enable them to ask a question.
