I have been reading a few blogs and online magazine articles about Cisco’s announcement at MacWorld that they now have a way for meeting attendees to watch WebEx presentations on the iPhone. Most of the articles talk about the cool concept, but nobody was able to talk about specifics.
I just had a conversation with the Public Relations Manager and the Director of Marketing for the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco. Respectively they are Leanne Schrotzberger and Alex Hadden-Boyd. Here’s what I found out.
The new offering allows attendees to participate in a WebEx Meeting Center session from their iPhone. Presenters must be on a traditional computer. Only Meeting Center is supported at this time. While there are no announced plans for extending support to Event Center or Training Center sessions, Cisco isn’t ruling it out as a future expansion. Just don’t look for it any time soon.
Meeting Center account holders must get themselves swapped over to the new hosted version of Meeting Center in order to use the new functionality. Cisco will be rolling accounts to the new release automatically over the next month or two. Account holders can choose to freeze their current release if they are averse to online upgrades and don’t plan to use the new functionality. They can also ask their customer service rep to expedite their upgrade if they can’t wait to play with the new technology. This explains why several commenters in the blogosphere said they couldn’t get it to work when they tried to attend an online meeting.
Attendees now have to choose the correct link to attend a meeting. There is one link for use from traditional computers and a different URL to attend from an iPhone. Cisco has not finished updating their automatic confirmation and instruction email templates to reflect the new attendee instructions, so it is important to check and customize your outgoing emails when you set up a meeting.
Meetings with streaming audio (audio broadcasting) do not deliver the sound over an iPhone. iPhone attendees must dial in on a phone line to hear the meeting audio. Alex intimated that this was due more to contractual agreements than technology limitations. Phone service providers don’t want people finding ways to not use telephone minutes!
Cisco is using standard iPhone interface technology that allows a user to do the 90-degree screen flip thingy that people love when looking at photos on the device. The meeting content flips to match the phone orientation. Attendees can also use iPhone’s zoom functionality to expand a portion of the screen to read slide content more easily inside a meeting.
Attendees can swap back and forth between a single-pane view of the slide content and a windowed view of the meeting that shows informational panels such as chat and the participant list. If a meeting host forces the display to full screen mode, the iPhone attendees see the same mini toolbar of function icons that attendees on computers see.
Although the iPhone is the only device currently supporting mobile access to Meeting Center, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see additional mobile devices added this year. Once the basic technology has been worked out, all you need is a phone with good screen management software, full 3G support for simultaneous web data and telephone audio (that leaves out Verizon), and a willingness to partner up on development. We’re talking about an opportunity for major new market expansion, and that should be catnip to the folks at WebEx!
For those of you who want some demonstrations and eye candy, there is a recorded demo available in WebEx recording format (which takes a while to load) or a shorter marketing video on their dedicated landing page.
Neat stuff, but I can think of a few potential hiccups that will need management. First, we all know that people don’t read instructions. That means some percentage of your attendees are going to click on the wrong access link (computer users will try to join through the iPhone link and vice versa). Be ready to answer confused calls as the meeting starts.
Second, some portions of the attendance world are going to start expecting and demanding access through their iPhone to any event. It’s going to be cumbersome to explain that they can’t attend your webinar because you are using Event Center instead of Meeting Center. Attendees don’t know the difference. They just expect to “attend a WebEx.” I can predict cries of “Why did it work yesterday, but not today?”
Third, the lousy bullet point presentations filled with small text that plague us today are going to look even worse on a two-inch screen. You’d better start learning good slide design techniques NOW! Nice big pictures or giant text that gets the point across in a quick glance.
That’s it for this entry. Now go watch your next WebEx sales team meeting from the hotel pool!
Addendum: I just saw a press release from Persony announcing the same kind of iPhone access for their web conferencing. It's not available yet, but it supposed to allow iPhone access for presenters as well as attendees. My goodness... The iPhone is turning into the next big web conferencing platform!
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