Introducing Stickers - a new dimension to video meetings

The first in a series of new enhancements to Enreach Meetings

Enreach Meetings is being enhanced by a series of new features that help make meetings more natural and productive, combined with exceptional ease-of-use. Building on the success of Enreach Meetings to date, these new features have been developed based on user-feedback, and help users to have even more effective meetings while working remotely.

The first major new feature to be introduced is Stickers, a brilliantly simple concept that delivers powerful benefits. Stickers is a collection of icons, which many of us already use to convey opinions and sentiment in other parts of our digital lives. So why not bring this instant way to communicate to our business meetings too? Stickers adds another dimension to meeting experience, and benefits include making meetings more interactive, enjoyable, and simpler to manage.

Enriching meetings

Stickers help more people contribute to a meeting (rather than just the main speakers), while making it easier to convey more information and nuances. This helps to mimic a face-to-face meeting, which has a variety of input from non-verbal cues.

Another advantage is reduced in-meeting fatigue. In physical meetings, people’s attention goes in different directions: they look at each other, at their laptop or notepad, and around the room. They may get up to fetch more coffee, or take a quick break. Stickers helps replicate that more natural way of meeting, by literally giving people something else with which to engage.

It is also easier for 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 is quite central, so people’s emoticon messages are easy to see and are live for seven seconds, or can be pinned to stay visible for longer.

Examples of Stickers in action:

• 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? Click the ‘no discussion’ icon.
• Moderator wants to check in on some actions? Use the ‘check / no check’ sticker to respond

As well as a standard pack of Stickers being introduced to Enreach Meetings, there will be a series additional packs specifically for popular methodologies, including Agile, Scrum, and Holacracy (which is already available).

Ease-of-use enhanced – including Active Speaker

There are usually two main reasons that people choose one online meeting service above another: simplicity of setting up or joining a meeting, and the in-meeting experience. Those attributes are already fundamental to Enreach Meetings, and another enhancement is Active Speaker, with a fresh, more intuitive user experience.

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.

Building on the track record of Enreach Meetings

These new features are the latest in a continued line of innovations being added to Enreach Meetings, which aims to deliver the range of comprehensive functions found in bigger, more complex solutions, but designed specifically for SMBs.

Accessible from any web browser, there is no need to download additional software (thanks to Web RTC). Just one link takes users to a meeting, without complicated signing-in. Created with mobility in mind, Enreach Meetings is easy to access also from tablets and smartphones, without requiring an app to be installed. Open by design, Enreach Meetings integrates seamlessly with other business apps, and is aimed at resellers who want to focus on adding value, rather than getting involved in technical complexity and investment.  

Ready to work straight away with self-explanatory features and requiring no training, Enreach Meetings is flexible and meetings can be customised to suit the preferences of each company, meeting or organiser. Video views of up to 25 people are supported by other functions such as a waiting room, record and replay, different viewing options and multiple organiser/moderator controls. Data stays in Europe, to allay any concerns people have over potential breaches of privacy legislation.

More new features to follow

Stickers and Active Speaker will be introduced in August, and are the first in a series of new features, with much more to follow in the coming months, including: presence and ability to customize your reachability (even on incoming mobile calls) when in a video conference, bandwidth optimisation, more integrations and a revised user interface, based on feedback from end-user research.

Many of us are attending more online meetings these days, so any way to enrich the experience matters. It’s time to modernise the digital workplace and Enreach Meetings helps SMBs move towards that goal.