Making Meetings More Effective and Driving Better Business Outcomes...

Transcription

1 Making Meetings More Effective and Driving Better Business Outcomes... Exploring Avaya Aura Conferencing Table of Contents Get Meetings Started Faster... 2 Manage Disruptions... 4 Make Meetings More Contextual... 6 Increase Attendance and Participation Rates... 9 Interact Naturally Sharing Ideas and Information...11 Unified Communications...14 Introduction You know that you could drive better business outcomes if only you could find more effective ways of bringing your people together and connecting with your suppliers, partners, and customers. You bring people together on conference calls, but too much of the meeting time is taken up managing facilities and logistics. To increase the efficiency of your meetings, this guide will show you how Avaya Aura Conferencing can help you: Get meetings started faster Quickly manage disruptions Make meetings more contextual Increase attendance of your target audience Enable people to interact naturally To increase the effectiveness of your meetings, this guide will show you how you can increase collaboration by: Sharing ideas, information, and meeting outcomes Embedding collaboration into your Unified Communications experience Key Outcomes Make meetings more effective Drive innovation, alignment, decision making by making meetings more collaborative User Empowerment 1. Get Meetings Started Faster 2. Manage Disruptions 3. Make Meetings more Contextual 4. Increase Attendance and Participation Rates 5. Interact Naturally 6. Share ideas and information 7. Unified Communications avaya.com 1

2 Get Meetings Started Faster So let s begin with getting meetings started faster. We ll look at the idea of click to schedule and click to join from the Microsoft Outlook plug in Multiple ways of joining a conference How to open meetings quickly... even if the host is not present Microsoft Outlook Plug In Before we even get into a meeting, we typically need to schedule it first. Go to your calendar, find where you want to schedule the meeting, click the [New Avaya Aura Meeting] button and your invite is ready with all the conference logistics in both the body and location field... all you need to do is enter the attendee list and subject, and send. When you are ready to join the meeting, just open the invite. Users who don t have the plug in can simply click on the URL in the invite Users on mobile devices can click on the URL, which will launch the Avaya Web Collaboration application For those with the plug in, they can simply click the [Join] button (if you want the flexibility to easily change these settings, don t click on set as default ) Note that the intelligence is there to connect the user as the moderator when joining their own meetings, even though the invite only contains the participant information details Let s assume for a moment that the user is an admin person who is responsible for organizing meetings for different individuals. The plug in has a delegate capability that allows a user to manage up to 10 accounts. Open the meeting invite Click on Add Conference Select whose conference details should be used avaya.com 2

3 Connecting There are multiple ways to connect to the conference: We ve seen one already, where we elected to click to join from the Microsoft Outlook invite using the Join capability in the plug in, or the URL in the invite. Of course there is the traditional way where you dial into the bridge and enter a collaboration code. You can join from your UC experience using Avaya Communicator. A mobile user with the Apple ios or Android application can join from their smartphone or tablet where voice and video will be sent via the data channel over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G networks (as seen in this Apple iphone example). If the user joins through the browser: They can have the system call them back. If they ve already dialed in, they can choose their telephone number from the list, which will join their telephony presence with their web presence (the system will automatically remember up to 10 numbers associated with the user). The user can stream the audio and video by way of a browser plug in. A first time user will see download plug in. Once downloaded, simply click connect. The user can use the A/V settings button to select the devices they want to use for speakers, microphone, and camera, which can be set before or during the conference. Open Meetings Quickly Fast Start then Don t you get irritated when you have to listen to music on hold for five minutes waiting for the meeting to start because the moderator has not arrived yet? Don t you hate it when you are the moderator and you ve just wasted 30 minutes of company time because you kept half a dozen people waiting for you? The Fast Start capability allows the meeting to begin as soon as the first person joins. If the moderator knows that they are going to be late, they might want to turn on Fast Start (or perhaps leave it on by default) rather than sharing their moderator code with everyone. Presentation Mode or then OK, now that we have everyone into the call for audio, what about chat, note taking, or content sharing? avaya.com 3

4 Presentation Mode allows anyone to start the collaboration session, and assigns presentation status to all participants so anyone can share content. There s no need to wait for the moderator to promote people to presenter status in the middle of the meeting. Default Settings Users have complete control over the default settings for their account. It can be used to set features based on how they want their meetings to run. It can be used to start the recording as soon as the meeting begins or determine whether to have audible entry and exit tones. This makes it easy for the user and IT since users can manage these functions by themselves. Roster Usually the first order of business on a conference call is to take a roll call. That s not necessary anymore, because the roster shows you a list of all participants and the modes they are using. If a user joins through the web but dials in separately, the system can remember up to 10 phone numbers associated with the user s account, and automatically join their phone and web presence together. Other guests and users can associate their phone number with their web presence by right clicking on their name in the roster and selecting [Identify my phone]. Attendance Report In addition to the roster, you can click on the and select [Participation reports] to access a real-time attendance report that shows when people joined or left the conference. Add Participant Having reviewed the roster, you may realize that a key participant is missing. It is very easy to add someone into the conference by calling out to them and having Avaya Aura Conferencing invite someone into the conference. Manage Disruptions Manage Noisy Lines We ve all experienced those times when a remote user has dogs barking in the background, someone forces everyone to listen to music on hold, or a participant starts a side conversation and doesn t mute the phone. The good news is that you don t need to go get an operator to silence that noisy line. avaya.com 4

5 Look for the speaking icon in the roster to identify where the noise is coming from. The moderator can then right click on the name, and mute or drop the person out of the conference. A participant can unmute themselves when they are ready to contribute to the discussion. Lecture Mode then If you are having a meeting that is more about sharing information with a larger group of people than conducting an interactive session, the moderator can turn on lecture mode. This will mute all participants, though anyone with presenter status will still be able to speak and share content. The moderator can unmute individual participants to allow them to ask questions or add critical information. Entry/Exit Tones or then Everyone may not have access to the roster, so using entry and exit tones is a good idea to let people know that the mix of participants has changed. However, in larger meetings those tones can be really annoying. When you are planning a large meeting, it s a good idea to turn off the tones using the default settings before the meeting begins. If you need to change the settings for the current call, you can do so from the conference controls. Lock Conference To control the flow of people into the meeting, you can lock the meeting at any time. This also helps to make the meeting more secure. Continuation Mode or then Frequently, as a meeting nears its targeted end time, a few people may be close to finishing an idea or making a decision, but the moderator must run to another meeting. Terminating the meeting and reconvening somewhere else could cause participants to lose their momentum and train of thought. Continuation mode allows the moderator to keep their bridge open until the last person disconnects, giving people the opportunity to finish the job at hand. Nothing is perhaps more disruptive than the moderator falling off the bridge and the entire conference being shut down, requiring everyone to rejoin. If this happens, Avaya Aura Conferencing will keep the conference session up for another two minutes, giving the moderator a chance to rejoin. If the audio signal or network bandwidth is weak, the moderator might want to turn continuation mode on as a precaution to keep the conference active should they lose connectivity. Raising Hands If the presenter is on a roll, it may not be the best time for a participant to interrupt the flow. Participants can indicate that they want to ask a question or offer a avaya.com 5

6 comment by right clicking on their name and selecting [Raise Hand]. This may be particularly important when in lecture mode. In lecture mode, the participant can t take themselves off mute. However, when the moderator sees a hand is raised, he or she can turn mute off so the participant can ask a question. Participant Independent View of Content Despite best efforts, some participants are still going to be late. The presenter is now on slide three and you don t want to take time to bring the late comer up to speed and waste time for everyone else. We ll be discussing content sharing later, but take note that when you are sharing documents from the library, participants scan skip backwards and forwards through the document without disrupting the flow of the presenter. Not only does this allow participants to skip back to see what they missed, but perhaps they have a question that will be answered on a subsequent slide. In some cases, it can offer real productivity benefits by allowing a participant to skim through the presentation content and determine whether their time is best spent remaining in the meeting or dropping off to make the best use of their time. Promoting Participant Roles Earlier we noted that you can automatically assign everyone presenter status. Fast Start and Continuation resolve problems that necessitate a participant joining as moderator. Even without these settings, participants can be promoted to Presenter or Moderator during the meeting to help keep the flow of the meeting moving forward. Make Meetings More Contextual Roster It may seem unnatural to be using a GUI (graphical user interface) for an audio conference. However, anyone who has used some form of visual voice mail can appreciate the power of using a visual interface to manage what was previously a voice only experience. Seeing a real-time dynamic list of the participants in a conference and their modes of connectivity helps put the discussion into context. Are key decision makers present? Is anyone missing? Are there people present that you don t know or recognize? Who can actually see the content? Knowing who says what adds a critical degree of context. The same comment uttered by two different people can carry different meaning and weight based on who said it, whether it s a senior person from a long standing customer or a new hire who avaya.com 6

7 recently joined the engineering team. The roster will show who is speaking, and allow participants to associate the voice with the individual s name. Video A substantial amount of communication is delivered via non-verbal cues. Video allows people to see reactions and emotions, and helps them gauge the degree to which participants are paying attention, and if participants are engaged in the discussion or multi-tasking and focused on something else. Avaya Aura Conferencing supports multiple windows of continuous presence Hollywood Squares showing the most recent speakers. In addition to the self-see or picture in picture, hosts and guests can receive up to nine windows through the browser, four windows with Avaya Communicator on Microsoft Windows or Apple ipad devices, and one window showing the active speaker through the Apple ios or Android application. In the browser, the user can click on the pop out button at the top of the video stack to make the video window pop out into a separate browser window where it can be sized and moved. Clicking on the close window icon of the video page will re-dock the video pane into the main conference page. Avaya Aura Conferencing supports H.264 SVC and AVC video codecs. Content Sharing We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words. Avaya Aura Conferencing provides a variety of ways to share content. Library: Each user on the system has their own library where they can store documents that are already rendered and ready to share when they are hosting a meeting or participating in someone else s meeting. There are several reasons for using the library:»» Participants can skip backwards and forwards through the presentation without disrupting the flow of the presenter (see Participant Independent View of Content above). avaya.com 7

8 »» Recordings and meeting reports will show a thumbnail of the slides or pages in the event and activity timelines to make it easier to navigate the playback.»» Mobile users can share and control preloaded content that would otherwise be difficult to do from a smartphone or tablet.»» Latency is minimized so slide changes are quickly extended to all participants. Entire Screen: Presenters can share everything on their desktop. Best practices suggest that users should be careful about and instant messaging alerts and windows that could pop up in the middle of a presentation that could be embarrassing or expose sensitive information. Portion of Screen: Presenters can draw and size or resize a rectangle on the screen that defines the area of the screen that they want to share. Anything that comes into the boundaries of that area will be shared. Application Windows: On Microsoft Windows PCs, users can select to share specific files that they have open. Hint for Microsoft PowerPoint users: when shifting into presentation mode, PowerPoint typically consumes the entire screen. This makes it difficult to both share content and see what is going on in the conference. Users should consider having the presentation show in a separate window instead of the entire screen (Slide Show >>> Set Up Slide Show >>> Browsed by an individual (window)). This allows the slide show presentation to appear in a separate window which can be sized and moved as desired. White Board: The White Board provides all participants with the opportunity to create content on the fly as if they were at a board in a meeting room. The sharing toolbar allows the presenter to toggle between different pieces of content, to annotate their content, and to use a pointer to better convey their key points. avaya.com 8

9 Increase Attendance and Participation Rates Mobile Workers If they are remote, participants might miss a lot of the richness of the meeting or choose not to participate. The Avaya Web Collaboration application for Apple ios and Android makes it easy for remote participants and guests to connect to the conference through their smartphone or tablet. Participants can see any of the content that is being shared, see and participate in the text chat, view and add to the meeting minutes and notes, and see the roster of participants. Registered users can also drive voice and video over the data network over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G through the application (see Connecting above). It would typically be difficult for a remote user to share a presentation from their smartphone. However, the user has access to their library and can pull up a document they have pre loaded and share and navigate through the document to lead a discussion from their smartphone or tablet. Apple ipad users can use Avaya Communicator and participate in the meeting through their Unified Communications Experience. The Apple ios and Android web applications complement Avaya Communicator for Android and Apple iphone in that users can connect to the conference through Avaya Communicator which in turn will launch the user into the web application. Leverage Avaya Aura Footprint Depending on the audience, participants may not want to join if they have to incur international or domestic long distance expenses. An enterprise can leverage its geographic points of presence to provide local dial in access. Avaya for instance has over 50 local dial in numbers for its own production network for Avaya Aura Conferencing. avaya.com 9

10 Connect via Internet or Outcall Some organizations may not have the geographic footprint to offer local dial in numbers through the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). However, the enterprise can still offer free access to the conference by promoting the use of audio and video through the browser. Avaya Aura Conferencing can also be configured to allow participants who connect through the browser to have the system call them so that the enterprise absorbs the expense instead of the participant. Interact Naturally HD Audio Sitting in on long conference calls where you are straining to understand what people are saying can be very fatiguing, and important details and nuances might be missed. Avaya Aura Conferencing can provide HD quality audio delivering excellent sound quality and making it easier and more enjoyable to engage in the meeting. Avaya supports G.711, G.722, G , and G.729 audio codecs. Note that G726 provides comparable audio quality to G.711 with about 50% payload bandwidth savings. The cascading media architecture supported with Avaya Aura Conferencing can reduce the bandwidth for audio and video required across the WAN. Low Latency We have all experienced the conference dance... those times where two people get caught up trying to speak at the same time and clip each other out. Realizing they are talking on top of each other, they both pause; the silence is then grabbed by both and they each try to speak again. People can cycle through this frustrating exercise several times before they finally sort it out. Avaya Aura Conferencing switches the audio and video media through the network, and thus does not have to process the media through an MCU (multipoint control unit). The result is very low latency. People can literally talk over each other (both good and bad) as if they were in the same physical meeting room. Try an experiment: have one person count from one to ten while someone else counts from ten to one and note that you can hear both talking at the same time. avaya.com 10

11 Sharing Ideas and Information Real-Time Collaboration Chat: During the meeting, participants can ask questions and carry on side conversations using text chat within the conference itself. Chat can be shared with all participants or can be exchanged with a specific participant. Chat and Minutes (see below) are enabled for collaboration sessions. Hence, even if web conferencing is not going to be used for content sharing, it is a good idea to initiate collaboration sessions to enable chat for audio-only conferences. Minutes: During the meeting, participants can record notes, keywords, action items, and questions. The item, item type, and item author are captured in the report which can be issued post meeting. These minutes are also captured in the recording event and activity timelines. Minutes and Chat (see above) are enabled for collaboration sessions. Even if web conferencing is not going to be used for content sharing, it is a good idea to initiate collaboration sessions to enable minutes and note taking for audioonly conferences. Content Sharing: The context section above explores content sharing, where it is possible to share content from the library, the screen, portion of screen, application window, or white board. avaya.com 11

12 Remote Control: Content sharing can be very collaborative because a remote participant can take over the screen or application of the current presenter allowing their keyboard and mouse clicks to control the presenter s PC. This allows a team to collaborate on a document in real-time instead of needing to send versions back and forth in non-real-time... helping to save time, and capture thoughts as they occur. An IT help desk might also want to use this capability to provide remote support to users, or maintenance on servers. Post Meeting Wrap Up Attendance Report: As noted earlier, moderators can save time at the beginning of the meeting by eliminating the roll call. At any time during the meeting and up to the point where the meeting ends, the moderator or participant can capture the attendance report from the active conference session. The report will show the names and associated phone numbers along with sign in times and leave times for all the participants. These can easily be copied and pasted into an or other document for record keeping. Meeting Reports: Consider how much work flow could be accelerated if people received a report within minutes after a meeting ends, containing all the key notes, action items, conclusions, and a record of all the public text chat. During or after the meeting, the moderator can access a report of the meeting, and export or copy the report, store it in a team space, or share it via . The report includes all the chat and minutes as noted above, as well as all conference events and slide thumbnails that were shared from the library. If all participants enter their notes and action items in real time during the meeting, a consolidated report can be shared after the meeting. Options are available to filter and sort the report contents. Recording and Playback: Sometimes not everyone can attend a meeting, or people weren t invited that should have been there. In addition, participants may want the opportunity to refer back not just to the notes of the meeting, but to what was actually said and by whom. avaya.com 12

13 Recordings capture and synchronize the audio, content sharing, chat, and note and minute taking. Recordings can be kept private for access only by the moderator, or they can be shared with others by way of a link obtained from the moderators recording library. The user is self-sufficient in sharing the recording and there is no delay post meeting or need to involve an operator or IT to obtain the recording. In sharing the recording, the moderator can decide whether the recording should only be streamed, or allow it to be downloaded by others in audio (MP3 format) or audio plus content (SWF format). By selecting the Events and Activity windows, the player will expose an event timeline to the left of the content, and an activity timeline below the content, both of which can be used to navigate the playback. Hence, it is very easy to find the relevant content instead of needing to listen to the entire playback end to end. The event timeline will show the sequence and timing (relative to the start of the recording) of chat, notes, minutes, and conference events. If content was shared from the library, the event timeline will also include thumbnails of the shared content. The activity timeline will include icons denoting chat, notes, and minutes, and again icons indicating content changes if the content was shared from the library. A user can mouse over the icons in the activity timeline to expose the associated content. The wider grey bands indicate who was speaking when and for how long. Hence, there is no more guessing as to who said what. Often one or two people dominate a discussion, but the questions and comments from other participants may be just as important. The activity timeline makes it easy to identify and navigate to those areas of the recording. The main content area will show any content that was shared from the library, screens, applications, or white boards, as well as synchronizing the audio with the content. An example playback is available here. Unified Communications Enhancing 1 on 1 interactions (point-to-point) A unified communications experience simplifies collaboration by bringing multiple forms of communication and collaboration into a single unified and integrated avaya.com 13

14 About Avaya Avaya is a leading, global provider of customer and team engagement solutions and services available in a variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options. Avaya s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit experience. The objective is to allow users to shift or add modalities with just a few clicks. Avaya Communicator for Windows and ipad allow users to easily: find a contact identify their presence state initiate an instant messaging session (perhaps something simple such as can you talk ) click-to-call add video add content sharing using all the modes noted above Avaya Communicator draws on various parts of the Avaya Aura Platform to provide its services, where the content sharing is provided by way of Avaya Aura Conferencing. Ad Hoc Conferencing Much of the content in this guide was discussed in the context of a scheduled meet-me type of conference. There are times when an ad-hoc conference is critical. Perhaps two people are conversing and they need another s input. Using Avaya Communicator, the same exchange as noted above can be initiated again, and then the new and additional people can be brought into the meeting to form an ad-hoc conference in real time. Likewise, there are times where two people are already engaged in a discussion when someone else calls you. The Avaya Communicator user can join the calls together, rather than needing to arrange to break down the calls and have everyone meet on a conference bridge. Conclusion Leveraging Avaya Aura Conferencing and using the techniques discussed in this guide, users can spend less time planning their meetings, make them more effective, and focus on driving innovation, alignment, and decision making. By getting meetings started faster, quickly managing disruptions, and making meetings more contextual, people can spend more time focused on outcomes, and less time managing meeting logistics Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved. Avaya and the Avaya logo are trademarks of Avaya Inc. and are registered in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks identified by, TM, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. 07/15 UC avaya.com 14