7 Cisco Webex Teams Hacks to Make Your Team More Efficient
Cisco Webex Teams is one of the most popular workplace communication platforms in the world alongside Slack and Microsoft Teams, and it helps a lot of teams become more efficient and work together better.
However, there are also many ways to boost Webex Teams’ benefits even further. Here are seven of them.
Use Spaces and Teams
Cisco Webex is unique amongst its competition because it allows two different types of group messages: Spaces and Teams. Although they have very different purposes, both can be very helpful to your team.
Teams are longer-term locations for group messages. This makes them better suited for more permanent messaging, like general team boards and administrative details.
Spaces are locations that are meant for shorter term, more temporary group messaging purposes. This means Spaces work best for specific projects or purposes that have a deadline or time limit. Spaces can exist inside of Teams or on their own.
Utilizing both can be incredibly helpful for your team as the Spaces can keep Teams from becoming too cluttered. Instead, project-specific information stays within a particular Space, so Teams can stay organized and let less information fall through the cracks.
Communicate with External Teams
Cisco also allows you to add people outside of your Cisco teams into a Teams space, so you can keep people like suppliers or clients in the loop. This means teams can collaborate with external groups to tackle issues faster and boost communication with friendly organizations.
It’s recommended you label these groups as external or open and adjust the privacy settings to help prevent sensitive information from accidentally being leaked.
Take Advantage of Bots
Bots allow teams to access third-party services directly within Cisco Webex Teams to automate processes, bring external information into discussions and work more efficiently. These bots and applications can be instrumental in helping keep your team’s workflow up and your messaging organized and on task.
Bots can participate in both direct messages and in group spaces, but can only access messages sent to it directly.
Here are some of our favourite bots and applications:
- Rememory (a reminder scheduling bot)
- Basecamp (a project management bot)
- Power Pack (a productivity tool to help users bulk repeat actions)
Create Zaps with Zapier
Zapier is a great tool to help automate administrative details and move information between over a thousand different platforms through formulas called “Zaps”. In this case, Zapier integrates Cisco Webex Teams with apps like Google Docs and Slack to make sure information doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Some Zaps that could be particularly helpful for your team include:
- Create Cisco Webex Team messages from inbound emails
- Post new Trello cards to a Cisco Webex Team space
- Post new Dropbox files to a Cisco Webex Team space
Use Cisco Webex for Developers
One of the best things about Cisco Webex is despite their many pre-made app integrations, you can also build your own through the Webex REST API to you can maximize your team’s efficiency as much as possible.
Head over to the Cisco Webex for Developers page to find out how to build as many bots and integrations as your heart desires.
Add Whiteboards
Cisco Webex allows you to create Whiteboards inside Teams and Spaces to help your team collaborate visually on projects and tasks. These whiteboards can also be created in meetings and can be viewed or edited by anyone.
Simply select the space, click the activity menu, choose Whiteboard, and select Create New Whiteboard.
Digitize Standups
Another way you can boost productivity with Cisco Webex Teams is by using Spaces to run digital daily standups. These meetings help teams stay on the same page, so they work better and smarter.
Standups can be run manually in Cisco Spaces, but there are also many apps that will automate the standup process and do the work for you. One such app is ScrumGenius, an automated Scrum bot that collects information from your team to carry out standup reports. These standups will later be sent to your team via an email summary report and metrics will be available to track blockers and goals.
Originally published at https://scrumgenius.com.
