Ask the Expert- Webex Hybrid Services Solutions

[Cisco Moderador]

This topic is a chance to discuss more about the concepts, best deployment practices and troubleshooting tips for Webex Hybrid services. Ask questions and discuss scenarios about the Webex Hybrid features, such as: Hybrid Media Service (Video Mesh), Hybrid Calendar, Hybrid Call Service, and Hybrid Data Security services.

To participate in this event, please use thebutton below to ask your questions

Ask questions from Monday 17h to Friday 28th of September, 2018

Featured experts

Aashish Dua is a Solutions Architect in form the collaboration Sales Team in India. He is a technology evangelist that enables customers to accelerate business and solve challenges via Cisco technology solutions. Aashish has rich experience for consulting, he has worked in all industry verticals and with different customers all around the globe. Before his current position, he was a TAC lead engineer for the Backbone team in India. Aashish holds a CCIE in collaboration and a SIP SSCA certification. He has particular interest in Cloud Technologies applications and Cloud Security. 

Aditya Gupta is a Systems Engineer in Global Sales team. He provides technical consultation to the Global customers for Cisco's broad range of products and technologies (e.g. R&S, Voice Video, etc. He specialises on Cisco Collaboration/Video Technologies. Aditya comes from Backbone TAC UC Team background where he worked on troubleshooting on the UC products, he also worked as consulting engineer for Cisco Cloud and Managed services, handling the key accounts for Cisco in collaboration domain. Aditya holds a Cisco CCIE in collaboration and a SIP SSCA certification.

Aashish and Aditya might not be able to answer each question due to the volume expected during this event. Remember that you can continue the conversation on the Collaboration community. 

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[tonypearce1]

This question relates to Webex meetings using Teams applications and Webex board. 

We have 2 locations each with a conference room and a webex board. Meetings are scheduled between the locations so the users in each office can collaborate together on the same projects. To produce the most productive meetings, both locations utilise the webex board, along with Cisco Proximity to engage in content sharing to the entire meeting. This content sharing feature is sent to both the local and the remote webex board so all users in the meeting can see the content.

Herein lies the issue - when a user in one location shares their screen or desktop, a recent change by Cisco now forces this screenshare to all members Teams applications like a broadcast. The issue is that, prior to this change, only the webex boards were consuming office internet bandwidth. However, since this change we now have each of the meeting participants consuming internet bandwidth due to the forced screenshare. Let me explain further. In a meeting room with 15 participants in one office and 20 participants in the other (which is common for us) prior to the change we would see the webex board  as the only device consuming internet bandwidth. This bandwidth would equate to approx. 3mbps for HD video and could go up to 10mbps (slightly over) for updating content sharing.

Now since this change, we again have the webex board consuming bandwidth as expected but in addition we have 15 users each consuming internet bandwidth for a forced screenshare. Your documentation does not give specific details surrounding this forced screenshare but monitoring has showed that each user is forced to consume 1mbit/s to 2mbit/s each. So in a meeting room of 15 participants, we now have an additional bandwidth requirement of between 15mbit/s to 30mbit/s on top of the webex board. This equates to around 42mbit/s whereas comparatively, before this change there would not be this forced screenshare and so maximum bandwidth requirement for the same meeting would be around 10mb/s. It also seems sub-optimal to have the screenshare displayed on the webex board as well as all of the participants teams applications. I am struggling to see the benefit of this design since the screenshare is already displayed on the "big screen" webex board, where the participants are already in clear-view.

A workaround we have discovered is to ask each of the users to close their teams applications during the meeting to prevent the forced screenshare so we do not hit our sites internet bandwidth limit of 30mb. However this introduces concerns and issues for our users as follows:

1. it's cumbersome and reduces productivity

2. some users forget

3. some users cannot close the Teams space because they need to collaborate within the space. Such as opening or checking files shared or message for the purpose of the meeting. 

Of course, a mesh node being deployed at the site would resolve the above issues, however it's not an option for us to purchase this. Additionally, when the Teams deployment design was completed, this was not a concern for us and has only been an issue because of the change to Teams. 

The questions are:

1. Can you provide me with use-cases as to why this change was pushed out to all users to force the screenshare? 

2. Will you make this screenshare broadcast an option so that users can opt-in if they require to see the same screenshare on their laptops as being already displayed on the webex board? 

[tonypearce1]

We have Active Directory Server 2012 which runs the core of our user database. We are using Cisco Webex Hybrid Directory Connector to add Teams users through an AD sync. For the most part this works well however we have an issue when a user departs our organisation because all of our employees lose the ability to search for the departed user and therefore lose the conversation history between them. For example:

1. sync AD users to teams 
2. users all use teams to collaborate
3. one of our users departs the organisation, say Dave Smith is their name (which deactivates their corporate Teams account)
4. all users can no longer search for Dave or Smith or Dave Smith and so lose ease of access to messages history, shared files and content.  

Again, this issue was not always present and has been introduced recently (in the last 6 to 8 months) by Cisco during their changes. So my questions are:

1. When will you finally resolve this issue and put the user experience back to how this was last year? 

2. When will you implement a software development release schedule which allows you to improve services and introduce features whilst also ensuring you do not introduce new issues or bugs which negatively impact the platform and thereby cause loss of productivity and loss of ability to collaborate?

3. And lastly, should in the future another bug or issue is introduced in this way, how can we have expedited support on the issue instead of being told that the issue is with the BU and there's nothing anyone can do?

[Aashish Dua]

Hello Tony,

If the user leaves the organisation and corporate teams deactivate the user, then general users will not be able to search the conversations / spaces created by the user who has left, you will also notice that "XXYY has left the space" message in the other spaces where user has contributed.

If an organisation has setup a compliance officer role and according to the corporate data retention policy, the compliance officer can search the content of the user who has left. 

Regarding the schedule and downtime, we are transparent if there is any service disruption happening at any webex services, which can be checked at status.webex.com, i would suggest you to subscribe to that page as well for proactive notifications.

If you have any specific concerns on the services we are happy to investigate and thus please engage your customer success manager and raise TAC case to investigate, thanks.

Thanks,

Aashish Dua

[tonypearce1]

Hi Aashish, 

So the problem here is that what you have described is quite different to our actual experiences. Last year, when a team member left our organisation we could happily search for the persons name (which is the 1-1 space name) as well as conversation content (ie the messages from the user). The current experience now is that we can search for the message content but not the space name. For example, if we search for "Dave" then it shows no results. But if we search for the message from dave, for example he may have said "Hi Tony" then the messages will show in search results and you can find the space with all of the message history. However it's not always easy to find messages that way. The end user might not recall specific words that they can search for, but of course they are remembering the persons name that they had the conversations with on Teams. 

So I'd like to ask you, how is this design conducive for collaboration? 

From my perspective, this does not facilitate ease of use or end user acceptance at all. In fact, this makes it more difficult for an end user to use teams, so please could you give more information to me to help me understand this design; as I see this as a design flaw or a bug.

Regarding this point: "If an organisation has setup a compliance officer role and according to the corporate data retention policy, the compliance officer can search the content of the user who has left. "
- This doesn't really provide us with any benefit. It is a hindrance because you're saying that an end-user should contact a compliance officer to help them find message history. It will consume an extra resource in our company for no benefit. 

I am suggesting to you to restore the functionality to teams as to how it was last year, which is to have the message content as well as the persons name being searchable. You did mention in your last message that the name AS WELL AS the message content is NOT searchable but how is that beneficial? However, since the message content is indeed searchable it does appear that you are unaware of that fact. 

"Regarding the schedule and downtime, we are transparent if there is any service disruption happening at any webex services, which can be checked at status.webex.com, i would suggest you to subscribe to that page as well for proactive notifications." - Yes have subscribed and as I type this, Teams has been down this morning for coming up to 3 hours. Down as in no service whatsoever for our entire organisation. Which does lead me to ask this: How long do you expect your customers to be without Teams before you invoke your backup datacentre? Because this has happened before and you are reluctant to invoke the backup DC which leaves us without a service and without the ability to collaborate within the organisation, except legacy email; which as you know is just not good enough in 2018

"If you have any specific concerns on the services we are happy to investigate and thus please engage your customer success manager and raise TAC case to investigate, thanks."

Yes I have raised many specific concerns with the platform here in this forum and I would be delighted if you would follow through with your gestures of following up. I have yet to see any follow up at the moment. It's clear that your description of how Teams works is different from the true functionality. I have raised many tac cases and have a very long list of numbers for you if that helps. Most cases get punted to the BU without resolution, hence I feel the need to "ask the expert". 

[tonypearce1]

Hybrid services with CUCM has clear documentation on the expected user experience and boasts the ability for on-premise users with desk phones to place a call between Desk phone to another users Desk phone. The Teams application is supposed to not only log the call in the history, but while the call is in progress it is supposed to allow users to click "share screen". The expected user experience is that their screen will be shared to the other person they are on a call with.

Unfortunately this has not worked since May 2017. Tested today the current experience now is as follows:
- A Teams user places a call from their Desk phone to another Teams user who answers on their Desk phone

- the Teams application shows the call in progress but does not give ability to share screen. You instead see a call progress indicator timer

- Clicking on the green timer showing the time that the call has been in-progress, places you into a video conference with the other person, which is not as documented or as desired. Additionally, because a conference call is started, microphone and speakers are activated on the laptop and therefore you get immense feedback. Again, providing a poor user experience. 

- after ending the call, the Teams call history does not show history for that call. 

Again, when will this one be fixed? And are you going to adopt a methodology that ensures that issues such as this are not introduced going forward? 

[Adam Pawlowski]

I'll ask a couple of questions, though I understand they may not all be able to get answered:

- Call Service Aware: is there a plan to decouple this from Call Service Connect, or make it at least have an option to close "empty" or "idle" spaces? This makes a giant mess out of the Teams space list which is less than desirable. The Teams chat paradigm is confusing enough for some users.

- Will 1:1 Chat be a thing that is distinguishable from a space, like a "DM" or whatever? With some of the Jabber integration information that came up in the past, Spaces and Chats were distinct, but, I don't know if that will continue. That would be ideal again at least to allow users to understand that you can still create a space/group chat and invite people in, but many people communicate in a 1:1 manner yet and grouping those things visually is important.

- Any other public information available on the Hybrid Data Services for using external storage partners? 

- I see a lot of reference to Hybrid Video Mesh replacing CMR Hybrid in some capacity, but, I can't see how this is something you can do at this time. I was told CMR Hybrid is "dead" for WBS33+, the documentation on this is pretty abysmal to determine what's up. It looks like we'd still want to deploy CMS for interop, assuming we can support a call from a connected Teams user coming back on premise and pinning back out through CMS to a S4B user - is this supportable? Can it be used for premise if we are Webex licensed? 

- With Webex Edge, there's allusion that it may be possible to use our own commodity I1 / I2 connection and VPN connectivity to Webex for SIP audio, instead of peering with Equinix. Is this true, maybe eventually? We'd already directed a SIP URI to meet@<site> but the experience of this IVR is not very good - it only prompts once for a meeting number, then sits idle. For non video enabled devices, or those that don't support starting that call with video, this is confusing and could use improvement. Presumably Webex Edge for audio relates to this.

[tonypearce1]

What I have done for our org. is create a route pattern of *01.5XXXXXXXX@site which results in sending the meeting number@site. This then joins the endpoint directly into the meeting without a user prompt. We find this a bit better than calling the IVR. Hope it helps. 

[Adam Pawlowski]

Good idea - we try and stay away from vertical service codes in our dial plan but that's probably the best way to approach it.
I'll see if the Webex service group here is interested in trying that out.

I'll say the meet@ (and I set a DID up that routes to it via Expressway) are not popular, but we do want to discourage people using PSTN dial in from our system unless it is absolutely necessary for them.

[buot_nemisio]

We experience issue with webex teams, some of our VP's can't able to transfer files or documents. Error message: "unable to send your message".

[tonypearce1]

There are still issues being experienced from the major outage on 25/09. You need to log a TAC case and explain the issue in the case where it will go through 1st line, 2nd line, 3rd line, BU and back again.I am having trouble with my tac cases because the communications from 1st line to BU are not very good, so be specific about your issue and give names of users and their email addresses as well as specific details of the issue. It may hopefully help reduce the number of TAC issues they have with your case. 

[Cisco Moderador]

Hi @buot_nemisio

This session is closed now, but please feel free to post your question in the following community. So experts in the area can assist you: https://community.cisco.com/t5/collaboration-applications/bd-p/discussions-collaboration-apps