What if your collaboration devices are more than screens with speakers and cameras? What if your messaging platform would adapt to the way you work? Since every employee and every workplace is different and has different requirements, Cisco gives you the possibility to customize every aspect of Webex App’s and devices to deliver a tailor-made collaboration experience.
The two-day Disrupt Collaboration Summit held at Cisco Switzerland’s office in Wallisellen was all about APIs and programmability in the context of Collaboration. The event combined a business outcome-focused sales track with a technology-focused developer track for a unique experience for customers and partners.
“Programmability is a way for us to provide our customers and partners with an easy way to innovate around all Cisco platforms” describes Julio Gomez, EMEAR Programmability Lead and keynote speaker at the Disrupt Collaboration Summit, the impact of programmability and APIs on our business.
Business impact through programmability?
In the sales track, participants were introduced to Cisco’s API vision and use cases from the field where programmability has made already made a business impact. During an ideation session, the attendees then had the task of coming up with programmability use cases for collaboration themselves. “I thank the team from Cisco for the preparation and the helpful value we got. We can take home many interesting points [from this event]” concludes Danny Meyer, Senior Consultant for Unified Communication at SPIE ICS a Cisco partner that had participants both in the sales and the developer track.
The developer track kicked off with an in-depth introduction into the different programmability options that Webex Endpoints and the Webex Teams API offer. After hearing the business use cases from the sales track the engineers got to work on their prototype.
The Hackathon
During an intense 24-hour coding event that brings together engineers from various disciplines to build a Proof of Concept or Minimum Viable Product in just one night the attendees of the developer track were able to put their newly acquired skills to the test and implement their chosen use case.
Developers working on their hackathon project.
Team “Bridges not Windows” consisting of Dennis Ligtenberg and Sandro Scheiwiller tackled the problems every conference organizer runs into. How do you coordinate multiple attendees in multiple conference tracks while also managing all the Webex meetings for the virtual attendees? The solution fully integrated into Webex Teams and allowed. For this, the jury awarded the team with the “Best for Webex Teams” price.
Winners of Best for Webex Teams – from left to right: Niema Nazemi (Judge), Dennis Ligtenberg, Sandro Scheiwiller and Marcel Neidinger (Event Organiser)
Have you ever turned up to a conference room and the touch 10 that is used to control the room device is nowhere to be found? Yes? Then the team “Devleman” has a solution for you. The team implemented a solution that detects the disconnection of an accessory and raises alarms in Webex Teams as well as giving audio-visual indications on the room device itself that this accessory is not for take-away. In case the touch 10 was taken not by accident but intentionally the room device also takes a picture of the person responsible. For their work, the team was awarded the “Best for Webex Devices” price by the jury.
Winners of Best for Webex Devices – from left to right: Niema Nazemi (Judge), Arnaud Ries, Marcel Neidinger (Event Organiser), Julien Chodlewski and Christophe Demont
In many companies meeting rooms have become scarce resources and every minute you spend searching for a room makes the moment you enter a booked room that is empty the more infuriating. RoomZ is a workspace management company that offers sensors to detect ghost meetings. However, most meeting rooms already have a sensor installed: The Webex device. During the hackathon the team from RoomZ used the people count technology offered in our Webex Devices to detect the presence of people in the room and fully integrated this information into the RoomZ platform. The jury was impressed by the possible business impact this implementation can have and awarded the prize for “Best Overall” to the team.
Winners of Best Overall – from left to right: Niema Nazemi (Judge), Willy Kurmann, Benjamin Burgy, Marcel Neidinger (Event Organiser) and Julio Gomez (Judge)
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