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In Webex Teams, where exactly do in-meeting video conference chats show up? (& other Teams UI issues)

jdrch
Level 1
Level 1

I recently used Webex Teams on Windows 10 to host a meeting for the 1st time and could not for the life of me find the chats attendees were apparently sending me. The app didn't even pulse its taskbar icon in response to receiving them. Where is it typically found?

 

On a side note, I've tried to buy in to Teams as a replacement for Meetings but find the former's UI incredibly confusing. Besides the invisible chats problem:

 

1) Meeting links on the web don't open in the app. Instead they seem to open in a separate PWA that looks like Meetings and even has its own taskbar icon group separate from Teams. This doesn't make sense to me and almost obviates having Teams to begin with.

2) There seems to be no entry point for Settings/Preferences within the Teams main window. The only way I've been able to find it is my right-clicking the notification area (system tray) icon. What am I missing?

 

3) I find the left panel icons incredibly confusing. For example, one would think the phone icon would be the entry point for meetings but instead it just takes you to a keypad. Huh? Personal meeting room links are inexplicably hidden behind a calendar icon. The irony of that last detail is the known issue that Teams can't display upcoming meetings within the app UI anyway, so the calendar icon is quite literally a bridge to nowhere.

 

4) There seems to be no way to force a manual update check.

 

I admit I may be a bit slow here, but the Meetings app doesn't have these issues, and neither does Zoom, for that matter. Teams strikes me as a hastily thrown together hodgepodge of features. Surely Cisco can do better for a paid corporate product?

2 Replies 2

Fritz_H
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

@jdrch 

I agree with you that it was pretty brave of Cisco to promote Webex-Teams to "the new Webex" - while it still misses some important features.

As far as I have noticed, Cisco is working on migrating all features of the "old" Webex (now Webex-Meetings) into the new Webex  (formerly known as Webex-Teams).

But I am surprised that this process takes sooooo long, esp. since this journey began 3 years ago as Cisco presented "Cisco Spark" - the first version of whats later going to be called "Webex-Teams".


Since this migration is not complete yet (at least I hope so) you still need both Clients, Webex and Webex-Meetings installed to cover all needs.
To automatically open the installed Meetings-Client from a Meeting-Link on a Webpage, you may need the Webex-Browser-AddOn/PlugIn.

 

Access to the Preferences for Webex(-Teams) is here: (room for Usability-Improvements, agreed)
(since the application does not offer to switch the language of the GUI-language, I can provide screenshots in german only, sorry)

grafik.png

 

About the Icons:

usually a meeting is scheduled in advance, esp. in a business-context. From that POV the calendar-Icon is not that bad.
I personally still have more issues to understand a Video-Conference as a "call".  But that may be language and/or culture-specific...

 

You are right, other than the Webex-Meetings-Client, the Webex(-Teams) Client does not offer "check for updates".
My guessing is, that Cisco is targeting this product to enterprise-clients where software-Updates are centrally managed.

This may perhaps also explain, why the Client is still missing integration to e.g. plain standard Google-Accounts (not just G-Suite) or other sources like Drop-Box etc. As far I have seen, these features are not available in the free Version.
I think this is a wrong decision by Cisco, since the user willing to evaluate Webex will get the wrong impression, that these feature are missing completely since there is no hint that there could be more, if you pay...

The Client does automatically check for Updates and will display a notification (green circular arrow below the calendar-icon).
It you click on it, the Client will auto-update immediately. Else it will update the next time the Client is started.

If you want to read about what´s new and what´s going to come, you may want to subscribe to this Article:
Team Collaboration - Webex | What's New  (you may get notified via e-Mail and/or in Webex(-Teams) - blue Subscribe-button..).

 

In fact there are more glitches than you mentioned so far:
e.g. the Date-Format used in the Android-App is wrong since EVER: mm/dd  instead of the correct format for most of Europe/the world: dd.mm.yyyy
the App does show my avatar besides my chat-messages, the Windows-Client does not. etc. etc.

 

But - to finish with some positive vibes - Cisco is listening! There is a ideas & suggestions-forum waiting for your input and votes for almost 2.500 ideas already posted there (started May 2020!

https://ciscocollabcustomer.ideas.aha.io/ideas

 

Thanks for the detailed reply, @Fritz_H ! Especially the ideas link. I think I'll stick with Meetings for now as it's still being developed and Teams seems half-baked in comparison.

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