Webex boosts admin controls to support hybrid workforces

Webex by Cisco has announced several new enhancements to its Control Hub, aimed at enabling administrators to better support a hybrid workforce.

The Control Hub is a centralized management portal that allows Webex admins to configure their service, manage users, and view usage analytics and reporting. The latest updates aim to speed up the identification and resolution of user-related issues and improve collaboration.

The headline feature is a new integration with Cisco’s ThousandEyes monitoring tool, which aims to help IT admins to diagnose and resolve quality issues with user’s video meetings, calls and events. The integration aims to help admins learn if quality issues are caused by the company’s network, a user’s internet service provider, or something else. Once the problematic link is identified, Control Hub will provide diagnostic information for understanding the cause of the issue.

ThousandEyes was a California-based company that provided organizations with network visibility and actions which acquired by Cisco in August 2020.

Webex has also announced new Control Hub as a Coach features. These allow users to track key metrics, get step-by-step guidance on how to achieve key business outcomes, and surface business-specific goals that can be acted upon and tracked on a quarterly basis. This feature will be available to Webex users in the fall of 2022.

The final update simplifies license provisioning by creating templates for a group of users who need to have special licenses and settings to meet compliance requirements. As new employees are synced from Active Directory or onboarded into Webex, licensing and settings are applied automatically.

“Control Hub makes it easier for all companies to manage today’s distributed workforce – from a single pane of glass,” Jono Luk, vice president of product management at Webex said in a blog post announcing the updates.