It’s hard to think back to pre-Covid times and remember how your meetings used to look. Maybe there were four or five members huddled around a conference room table, while one or two folks joined in remotely. Maybe everyone was an in an office environment, even if they were dialing in from different locations. Realistically, the office was home base for the majority of employees and therefore, the video conferencing experience tended to skew in favor of the in-office experience. The hardware was bright and shiny…and the application seemed somewhat secondary.

Well…here we are. WFH isn’t going anywhere any time soon and fundamentally, habits are being changed that will have longstanding consequences for where and how people work going forward. Our new reality has accelerated video conferencing innovation in many ways during the pandemic, but perhaps the most vital is the new baseline requirement that team members can see their fellow team members without limitation. In a pre-Covid world, where you have clusters of employees joining meetings from a set of conference rooms, the need for more than nine video tiles on a screen was the exception…not the rule. In a Covid-world, organizations simply need more visibility to ensure their teams stay connected.

With this recognition, we are excited to announce two major layout improvements to BlueJeans Meetings.

First, we are thrilled to expand our gallery view capability up to 25 video participants with a dynamic, 5x5 on-screen layout. This new capability for larger meetings automatically resizes the video tiles to optimize the viewing format depending on the number of video attendees present in the meeting.

For those of you that are exceptionally detail oriented, you will notice that BlueJeans Meetings has reduced the bordering around each video participant to provide an immersive, edge-to-edge video conferencing experience that more effectively uses all of the space within the application window. We have also added a visual indicator for the meeting speaker in gallery view to quickly locate who is talking, as well as a real-time network signal for each participant in case any issues spring up.

Next, we are excited to empower our mobile users on both iOS and Android with a new robust set of layouts that will help them visually connect with their team members when they are on the go. These new layouts will offer the ability to see up to 9 participants in gallery view during a mobile BlueJeans Meeting and also provide users with the ability to scroll to see additional participants when in Active Speaker view to make the most of the limited screen space on a mobile device.

Over the past seven months, we have had the opportunity to learn so much from our customers about how we can best help them succeed whether they are working at home, on the go, or (hopefully) back in the office. We look forward to these new layouts helping teams remain in touch and connected to better tackle the challenges that lay ahead of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can try our new expanded gallery view today by signing-up for a trial or purchasing a BlueJeans license.