WebEx MeetingCenter 7.3 Upgrade Announcement and Release Notes

Communiqué Conferencing Introduces a New Version of WebEx™ Meeting Center (7.3)

NOTE: This notice applies if you are scheduling meetings via either www.communiqueconferencing.com or www.ccimeet.com.

Version 7.3 Release Notes

Meeting Center 7 sets the standard for simple, powerful online meetings. With an updated look, improved usability and innovative sharing enhancements, Meeting Center 7 will increase presenter efficiency while improving the attendee experience.  Meeting Center 7 debuts PowerPanels, a way to interact in full screen views while privately managing meeting functions such as chat and attendee management. PowerPanels enable presenters to run full screen presentations, applications, or desktop sharing while transparently managing meeting functions such as chat, attendee lists and notes. Presenters and attendees can now create their individualize user experience during their meeting. All in real-time, presenters and attendees have the power to manage a meeting and provide a smooth attendee experience. Meeting Center has begun the evolution of the in-meeting experience with this user-centric design initiative that empowers all participants to be in control. 

New Features

Ease of use

User Interface Updated for Ease of Use

Consistent User Interface

Tooltips

Shortcut Keys and HotKeys

Quickstart

One-click Integration Enhancements

Outlook Integration Enhancements

In-Meeting Enhancements

• PowerPanels
• Contextual Panel Settings
• Floating Icon Tray
• Streamlines Switching
• Alerts
• Sharing Indicator
• Share Meeting Manager
• True Color Application Sharing Support

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The following major new features are available with the 7.0 release

Ease of Use

User interface design—Input from new, novice and power users confirms that the design makes meeting features easier for new users, while remaining familiar for experienced users. Emphasis was given to both natural and contextual user interface.

Consistent user interface—Functions are now consistent across WebEx services. With a simultaneous release of this design in all services, users can learn a new function once and use it everywhere.

Tooltips—are available for all icons and buttons in the meeting window, so users can quickly learn about features and tools. Tooltips also provide quick context-sensitive help to keep meetings running smoothly.

Shortcut Keys and Hotkeys—provide greater productivity for power users.

QuickStart—For first-time hosts and presenters, QuickStart is a visual and descriptive guide to effective meetings.  QuickStart provides one-click, easy access to the most commonly used features in a meeting, such as Presenting a Document, Sharing an Application, and Sharing Your Desktop.

 

PowerPanels—A major feature of this design is the user-centric, individually-controlled private panel views of meeting content such as Participants, Chat, Notes, Video, or Q&A. You can open and use only those panels you need. It's easy to customize the meeting content viewing area by collapsing, minimizing, or resizing panels.
You can float panels from the Floating Icon Tray while in Full Screen view, to get to essential meeting functions without interrupting the sharing content. Floating panels are not shared or visible to Attendees.
Contextual Panel Settings—Right-clicking the mouse in a panel provides easy access to settings and privileges, eliminating the need to access several different menus.
Floating Icon Tray—Gives complete access to all panels and tools while in Full Screen view. Presenters now have complete meeting productivity and control, because they can constantly monitor and react to changes in the meeting environment while in Full Screen.
Streamlines Switching —Presenters can seamlessly switch between sharing modes from the Floating Icon Tray. By streamlining access to sharing modes, there's no more Stop-and-Go to switch modes during a meeting.
Alerts—Participants see visual and audio cues of changes in your meeting, to stay continuously informed of the meeting environment. Alerts can be either blinking and/or beeping. Alerts are displayed in both in the Meeting Manager and in Full Screen view.
Status Indicator—Provides a consistent location in all services to display meeting status to participants. This information includes meeting number, telephony and Internet Phone information, recording indicator, connect status, and SSL encryption status.
Share Meeting Manager—Presenters sometimes need to share the meeting manager for training purposes. This feature is now in the Sharing menu, making it easy to share the meeting manager, and eliminating accidental meeting manager sharing during Desktop Sharing.
True Color Sharing Support — Presenters can initiate desktop or application sharing with true (32bit) color support from a Microsoft Windows system. This features needs to be enabled for a site in the site administration, and for hosts via session types. The host can enable true color mode through the meeting options dialog. Sharing in true color mode will preserve the quality and integrity of the application and/or desktop being shared. However, the true color sharing mode will increase bandwidth utilization.

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 Known issues and limitations for Mac OS X 

• The Mac Client does not incorporate new Meeting Center 7 features listed in the "New Features for MS Windows Client" section.
• WebEx Recorder is available only for Windows. However, WebEx Player for Mac OS can play WebEx Recording Format (*.wrf) files that were created using WebEx Recorder for Windows.
• Attendee Ready Indicator is not available to Mac OS users to all hosts and attendees on all platforms.
• OpenGL is not currently supported, which prevents some applications from being shared in full screen (e.g. Keynote)
• Users wishing to share Keynote presentations should export their presentations to either PDF or QuickTime format, and can share the exported file using Document Share.
• The Alternate Host Role is not currently supported.
• Preload/Autoplay UCF presentation is not supported.
• Clients will not be able to connect to WebEx meetings if they are behind a Microsoft ISA proxy server with user authentication turned on.
• Sharing PDF documents in landscape mode is displayed in portrait mode. This is a known limitation with WebEx. Users should open the PDF in Adobe Reader and share the Adobe Reader with application sharing to preserve the page layout during sharing.

Notes for UNIX (Java) Users

Before installing Meeting Manager on UNIX Systems, ensure that your computer meets the minimum system requirements.  

Version 7.0

• Presenters can share Star Office presentations using the document sharing feature
• Attendees on a Linux client can view video
• Users on Linux can now view WebEx recordings (WRF) streamed via the browser
• Hosts, presenters and attendees on a Linux client will be able to use Internet Telephone (VOIP)
• The Linux client now supports viewing of PowerPoint animations and transitions
• Hosts and attendees can join from a HP-UX workstation.
• Improved document sharing performance

Known issues and limitations for Linux Users

• The Linux Client does not incorporate new Meeting Center 7 features listed in the "New Features for MS Windows Client" section.
• Users using the Mozilla Browser will need to ensure that they have Java Plug-In installed for Mozilla.
  1. Download and install the J2SE runtime environment from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html
  2. Place a symlink to /usr/java/jre<version>/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so in your mozilla plugins/ directory.  (Note: copying the file instead of making the symlink will cause Java to crash.)

     Example:

     • $ cd /usr/local/mozilla/plugins
     • $ ln –s /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_04/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so libjavaplugin_oji.so
• Presenters and Hosts on a Linux client can only use the highlighter to annotate during desktop and application sharing. Windows and Mac clients have use of all the annotation tools.
• Linux clients will not be able to connect ot WebEx meetings if they are behind a Microsoft ISA proxy server with user authentication turned on. This is a known Java issue documented by Sun (http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4636657)
• WebEx Recorder is available only for Windows.
• Preload/Autoplay UCF presentation is not supported.
• Workstations running in 256 colors may not be able to see annotations properly; users should run workstations with 16-bit color.
• Users can only clear all annotations. They do not have the ability to only clear their own annotations.
• The attendee greeting dialog will fail to popup when using Firefox browser.
• Users using Netscape 7 on Turbo Linux may see user interface layout errors in the client.

 

© Copyright 2006 Communiqué Conferencing, Inc. • All rights reserved • WebEx™ and Meeting Center™ either a registered trademark or trademark of WebEx Communications Inc. in the United States and other countries.