No Jitter Roll: Five for Friday 2019-11-28No Jitter Roll: Five for Friday 2019-11-28
A look at the latest news coming from Fuze, Zoom, Bluescape, Mio, and AT&T.
November 28, 2019
In this week’s No Jitter Roll, we share the latest on a vendor’s user adoption strategy, a UC strategic partnership, an enhanced team collaboration experience, an improved cross-platform chat service, and AT&T’s progress to nationwide 5G.
Fuze Guides User Adoption
We kick off this week’s roundup with news from cloud communications provider Fuze, which has unveiled an end-user adoption strategy alongside new adoption services and an adoption playbook.
By extracting insight from thousands of implementations, Fuze has developed a five-stage adoption approach for enterprises. It consists of:
Align & Strategize – develop an adoption game plan by identifying stakeholders, conducting end-user surveys, and creating plans
Promote & Prepare – launch an internal campaign with posters and town halls about the new offering
Understand & Educate – develop an engagement plan by appointing ambassadors and conducting use-case workshops and end-user training
Enable & Excite – prepare go-live support and provide users with self-help tools
Measure & Reinforce – measure implementation success with adoption assessments and optimization initiatives
To further assist in adoption, Fuze has released a playbook that instructs on best practices and provides specific programs, initiatives, tips, checklists, and templates for each implementation stage. For those enterprises seeking more hands-on support, Fuze has rolled out adoption services that provide enterprises with user adoption and change management strategies, Fuze said.
Zoom Partners With Equinix for Expansion
In an enhanced strategic partnership announced last week, cloud video services provider Zoom Video Communications will leverage interconnectivity platform of its data center host, Equinix, to expand its global footprint.
By utilizing Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, an SDN-enabled interconnection service, Zoom will be able to establish connections between disparate infrastructures – its own and other companies’ -- on the Equinix platform, according to Equinix. This includes connectivity to network service and cloud providers and, as part of the partnership, to specific business verticals like financial services and government, Equinix said.
Currently, Zoom hosts a portion of its infrastructure within Equinix International Business Exchange data centers in nine regions (Amsterdam, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, Toronto, Silicon Valley, Frankfurt, Melbourne, and Sydney), according to Equinix.
Bluescape Enhances Experience
Moving over to the visual collaboration space, this week Bluescape revealed new features for its platform, including:
A smart grid image organizer that allows users to display multiple images in a smart grid arrangement. This function is available for touchscreen, laptop, and desktop clients and will be available for mobile users in the future, Bluescape said.
Customizable canvas sizes with "click and drag" functionally. Canvas resizing will come to mobile devices in 2020, Bluescape said.
An enhanced document viewer that can handle documents of more than 50 pages and Excel files of up to 20,000 rows, and allow users the ability to pan through and zoom in on pages. This feature is in limited release with general availability planned for early 2020, according to Bluescape.
A remote management function that allows users to close a workspace from their laptop or mobile application.
Additionally, enterprises can integrate their preferred UCC application with the Bluescape Digital Visual Container platform, Bluescape said.
Mio Releases V2 of Its Cross-Platform Group Chat
In other enhancement news, Mio this week released Version 2 of its cross-platform private group chat functionality for Slack and Microsoft Teams users.
With the new functionality, multiparty group conversations initiated on Microsoft Teams will now be synced as a private Slack channel, with the prefix of “_teams-chat-," Mio said. Additionally, group direct messages initiated in Slack will have fixed membership in multiparty conversations in Teams, and Mio will send contextual in-chat messages to help Slack, Teams users when something needs explaining, for example, when a Teams feature isn't supported in Slack or vice versa., Mio said.
Looking to Version 3 Mio said that Slack channel renaming will be coming, and Teams users will be able to decide whether newly invited participants will receive the entire chat history in the group chat upon joining.
AT&T Commits to 5G 2020 Goal
Lastly, AT&T made a series of announcements as part of its plan to bring nationwide 5G to market in the first half of 2020.
In the weeks to follow, AT&T plans to roll out low-band spectrum to the Indianapolis; Pittsburgh; San Diego; Providence, R.I.; and Rochester, N.Y.; markets. It will later extend the service to Boston; San Jose; Las Vegas; Milwaukee; New York; San Francisco; Birmingham, Ala.; Bridgeport, Conn.; Buffalo, N.Y.;Louisville, Ky.; and other cities.
Additionally, 5G+ services over mmWave spectrum will be available to enterprises in 21 cities with plans to bring it to 30 by early 2020, AT&T said.
Looking for more companies and other UCC technologies? Then, make sure to check out the growing exhibitor list for Enterprise Connect 2020 and start planning your trip today. Registration is now open; use the code NOJITTER to save $200 off the current rate!
