At Blue Jeans Network we continually strive to improve our service with new features and capabilities. On Tuesdays our Sales Engineering team is going to talk about a different tip to get you better acquainted with the service and to get the most out of your meetings. For this first installment, they'll walk you through our brand new Push to Talk feature.

Have you ever wanted to minimize the chatter and background noise of a conference but still be available to ask a question without having to press a small icon next to your name? This feature allows muted participants to temporarily unmute their microphone for the duration of holding down the large space button on the keyboard of your PC or Mac, kind of like talking into a walkie talkie. This is a great function for people talking on the browser or desktop option. Did you know that this feature will work on room systems too? 

Room system usage: The push to talk feature is a system wide option. When looking at the connection of a Polycom or Cisco endpoint into our service. There are two places that audio can be muted, the endpoint side and the Blue Jeans side.

• When a moderator or person mutes a room system from the roster list on a Blue Jeans call, it is from the Blue Jeans side.
• When a person mutes a room system from the microphone on the middle of the table, it is from the endpoint side.

Sometimes the microphone button is too far or the remote control is not handy. In one example, I had an HDX4000 personal video conference unit and the mute button was beyond my reach due to a medical issue. Once I paired my HDX4000 to the web browser, all I had to do was mute my microphone from the roster list as shown below.

Once muted, I would press the spacebar on the computer keyboard to talk whenever I needed to talk or ask a question.

Using this feature I could cut down on a considerable amount of background noise. As in the picture above, a visual indicator will tell you from the service whether the microphone is muted or unmuted.

Things to be aware of: When you are paying attention and only following the video conference in progress, the push to talk feature works well. When multi-tasking across multiple webpages you may find yourself caught on mute. The spacebar of the keyboard will only work when the browser roster page is selected as the active window. In other words if you mute yourself, then switch to your email, when you press the spacebar it will not open your microphone. In this case you would have to switch back to the connection page.

Stay tuned for more quick tips and helpful tricks in next week's edtion! Try out the push to talk feature here.