Last Thursday we conducted the third webinar of our three-part remote work webinar series entitled, "Rapid Deployment: Best Practices for BlueJeans Admins." I was joined by two of my awesome coworkers, Liz Ojile, Manager of Onboarding and Stuart Minchington, Manager of Technical Services.
Currently IT admins are being tasked to enable their workforce very quickly with video conferencing. It is now more essential than ever for companies to enable their employees to connect and collaborate remotely with minimum disruption. Watch this webinar for an overview on how you can quickly deploy BlueJeans in your organization and hit the ground running for your remote work initiatives.
This webinar covers the following key topics:
• Managing admin tasks
• How to navigate the admin portal
• Help desk training and resources
Getting Started
The first step is your technical setup. The best team to partner with for this stage is your internal network administrator, although that may vary according to different organizations. In our current unique remote work situation, if your employees will not be accessing the office network, it's okay to push this one to a phase two priority and circle back to it. However, if you have anyone in your office or someone at home using VPN, this should be a phase one priority.
The next task is to decide whether you want to enable downloading of the BlueJeans apps for your users, or if (in case of a locked-down environment) you want them to use a web version of BlueJeans. Either ways, you can choose the option that is right for you. BlueJeans also supports deploying the app throughout your organization with the deployment tools that you are using.
Admin Panel
The Admin Console allows you to change important features such as modifying group settings and creating a custom landing page for your organization. Modifying group settings is high priority before deploying the service. If you have a large number of users, you may find it beneficial to create your own domain to log in to BlueJeans.
In the admin page, you can check off the boxes that you want to change from the default settings. One quick tip to decide what you should keep versus what you want to change - we recommend discussing with someone who may be a power user or someone in your organization who knows the different use cases for video conferencing.
These are some of the settings we get asked about a lot:
  • Personal Meeting ID: You can set this so that users are prompted to use a personal meeting ID that is unique to them (often we recommend using their phone number).
  • Turn on / off downloading the desktop app: In a locked down environment, you can turn off the prompt that encourages users to download and install the BlueJeans desktop app so users are prompted to use the web version instead.
  • Changing default time zones: Users can set their own time zones but you can set the default time zone for everyone when they first get started.
One of the cool things about the Admin panel is that you can customize the BlueJeans landing page for your organization and also add your company’s logo in different parts of your BlueJeans deployment.
The next critical task is creating user accounts. If you have up to 20 users, you can add them manually in the admin portal. The users will be sent an invite to have them sign up to BlueJeans. For larger deployments, you can batch upload a CSV file of your users and BlueJeans support will add them to your enterprise. For even larger deployments, you can add users more efficiently with domain approval or by using single sign on.
Training and Resources
An important part to a successful deployment is enabling your users to use BlueJeans. After setting up your deployment, make sure to have a communication plan that will help you and your users to be successful quickly. Firstly, have a look at all the training options available to you so you can decide what training path is best suited for your organization. You should encourage the training to be time bound so that users feel a sense of urgency to get up to speed on using BlueJeans. We highly recommend new users go through the Quick Start training that can be completed within 15 minutes and will provide the most basic and important information your users will need.
You have multiple options to help you reduce the number of questions and support tickets you receive as you deploy BlueJeans. We offer sample templates with the most important information that you can share with your organization or include in your corporate intranet so you don’t have to create it from scratch. To arm your IT Admin and support team to support your users, you can use our detailed training modules to train your team.

We hope you found our Remote Work webinar series helpful during such a critical time. As always, reach out to us for any queries and check out the BlueJeans blog and Remote Work Resource Guide for more best practices to help you make your organization’s working from home experience productive, seamless and enjoyable.