BlueJeans by Verizon, an enterprise-grade video conferencing and events platform, has announced a core set of new features for meeting security, engagement, and time management to augment the work from home (WFH) experience. Driven by rising customer demand for more natural collaboration and secure engagements as the world settles into today’s remote work reality, the latest enhancements to BlueJeans Meetings help remote workers stay safe, connected, and productive.
“Having BlueJeans in place to facilitate real-time video communication across the company has been mission-critical for ensuring our business continuity during these uncertain times,” said Peo Enea, Global Voice and Multimedia, Electrolux IT.
“With the majority of our 55,000 strong workforce working remotely right now, user experience and security have never been more important. With BlueJeans Meetings, we know we’re providing our employees with a trusted platform for internal collaboration and customer support that’s both easy to use and thoughtfully designed to improve upon the overall work from home experience.”
BlueJeans saw a 300% increase in utilisation over the pre-COVID-19 average – which required rapid scale out. Using AWS to scale up beyond the existing hybrid cloud infrastructure, BlueJeans was able to stay ahead of traffic increases smoothly and seamlessly and remain focused on accelerating product innovation around emergent customer needs that support the way people work today.
Enhancing user-centric security
Unfortunately, the surge in online meetings has also brought malicious and disruptive activity. BlueJeans enhanced its existing security and privacy capabilities with new features that meeting hosts can use to protect the integrity of their meetings and give confidence to all meeting attendees.
Restricted Meetings: This new capability provides additional authentication modes for restricting meeting access to ensure that only invited participants can join a meeting by using a unique one-time passcode that can be authenticated via email confirmation or by logging into a BlueJeans account. Restricted Meetings not only ensures secure access for internal employees, but also for external people like board members, investors, customers, and partners – a key differentiator. For internal-only meetings, BlueJeans also offers the ability to restrict access to users from a single organisation to prevent external parties from joining meetings.
Waiting Room: The new Waiting Room experience will provide meeting hosts with better controls for managing who can be admitted into a meeting.
AES-256 GCM Encryption: All video, audio, and content in transit will be encrypted using AES-256 GCM encryption to deliver improved security and faster performance.
Screen Share Controls: Administrators can now control who has access to screen share at the enterprise, individual, and per-meeting levels, so that meeting hosts can prevent unwanted screen share takeover.
Quick Lock: A one-click capability at the top of the screen makes it easy for meeting hosts to secure meetings and prevent unwanted guests from joining in the middle of a confidential discussion.
Relieving WFH video fatigue
As organisations continue to navigate through uncertainty, effective team coordination and real-time communication is key. As remote workers join what feels like an endless series of video calls, video fatigue can set in and impede productivity. To help people feel more engaged, collegiate, and collaborative, BlueJeans is launching features designed to simulate more traditional in-person experiences, while saving precious time.
Interaction Capabilities: With Raise Hand, ‘Hand Clapping, Thumbs Up/Down, and Drop the Mic, and also new emojis for chat, BlueJeans gives meeting attendees more ways to express themselves and engage with each other that more closely reflect the in-person experience.
Native Virtual Backgrounds: from Shutterstock and Background Blur: Attendees will be able to choose custom backgrounds or blurring densities. BlueJeans is also partnering with Shutterstock to provide preloaded, high quality background images so attendees don’t have to upload their own.
Smart Meetings Transcription: Now available as a Meetings add-on, this allows anyone to scan a post-meeting transcript for key information, without having to sift through meeting chit-chat.
Floating View: Attendees keep track of a meeting conversation even when BlueJeans is not the primary application window on the desktop, making multitasking easier.
Slack Integration for BlueJeans Smart Meeting Highlights: The enhanced Slack integration automatically populates any private Slack channel with a Smart Meeting summary to share key meeting details—including highlights and action items—so those unable to attend a meeting can quickly catch up via Meeting Highlights without having to dig through email.
“Video conferencing has become fundamental to everyday business success,” said Jim Lundy, CEO, Aragon Research. “As video collaboration tools help the world stay connected during the pandemic, it’s crucial now more than ever that vendors remain diligent in delivering capabilities that proactively mitigate risks while optimising user experience. BlueJeans’ new security and user experience innovations balance security with ease of use to help organisations work securely and productively.”
Availability
AES-256 GCM Encryption, Waiting Room, Non-Raise Hand Interactions, and Virtual Backgrounds will be available for customer preview by the end of the summer. To stay up to date on the latest features and availability, visit: www.bluejeans.com/product/meetings
