The first major new feature to be introduced is Stickers, a collection of icons, which many of us already use to convey opinions and sentiment in other parts of our digital lives. Stickers are designed to mimic a face-to-face meeting, where participants can input with non-verbal cues.
Stickers can also be used by the moderator to keep track of who wants to communicate something, rather than having to look at multiple video faces, or read the chat dialogue. The Stickers mini menu makes emoticon messages easy to see and are live for seven seconds, or can be pinned to stay visible for longer.
Enreach says examples of how Stickers can be used include:
- Urgent question or need to leave the meeting, but finding it hard to break into the conversation? ‘Raise a hand’.
- Moderator sets everyone an exercise. Ask them to pin a ‘check mark’ when they have completed the task.
- Want to agree with the point being proposed? Choose ‘no objection’.
- Moderator wants to give the guest speaker the floor… users can click the ‘no discussion’ icon.
- Moderator wants to check in on some actions… users can use the ‘check / no check’ sticker to respond.
A standard pack of Stickers will be introduced to Enreach Meetings this month, and there will be a series additional packs specifically for popular methodologies, including Agile, Scrum, and Holacracy.
Enreach Meetings has also enhanced the user experience with the introduction of ‘Active Speaker’. With Active Speaker, the person speaking is larger than other participants’ video images, to optimise sharing of information to the rest of the audience, as well as being another way to change the screen regularly and keep people visually engaged.
The video conference software is easy to access also from any web browser, as well as tablets and smartphones, without requiring an app to be installed. The company says more features will follow in the coming months, including: presence and ability to customise your reachability (even on incoming mobile calls) when in a video conference, bandwidth optimisation, more integrations and a revised user interface.
In the UK, service providers and resellers can purchase Enreach Meetings as an unbranded solution, and integrated within the UC suite at Enreach’ companies Centile as Istra Collab Business, and at Swyx as Swyx Meeting, whereas SMEs can buy Enreach Meetings directly from Enreach’ company Network Telecom.