“I want to look them in the eye.” It’s a common saying about the importance of body language. In the past, that “look” might take a day of travel and cost most of a day of productivity. Today, however, modern enterprises are turning to real-time unified communication solutions to get meeting participants engaged—and cloud technology is the key.

Smart Office Collaboration Rooms from Ribbon Communications offer cloud-based HD multi-party video conferencing and screen share, available to anyone with a web browser. Ribbon is announcing that it will deliver free cloud-based Unified Communications and collaboration technology on the IBM public cloud to support IBM clients’ remote staff.

You’re in control, even an ocean away

To be productive, collaboration users need to stay focused and engaged. Seeing body language and non-verbal cues offers tremendous benefits over a traditional, audio-only conference call. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean participants can’t get distracted. Thankfully, Smart Office gives moderators’ powerful tools, including the following:

• Mute audio—per person, all participants (with personal override), and all participants
• Mute video—per person, all participants (with personal override), and all participants
• Remove participant
• PIN function to secure rooms
• Lock conference (to preclude new attendees)

You’ll never have to beg participants to mute themselves when the dog barks or they enter a wind tunnel from their mobile phone.

Get everyone together without the confusion

Smart Office eliminates the common hassles that often afflict traditional meeting services—you don’t need to sign-up for every session and send out a different meeting address for every event because Smart Office provides each user with their own secure, personal collaboration room.

You can easily set a PIN to secure access and/or lock a conference to prevent additional entrants. If a meeting moves by 30 minutes, the meeting invitation doesn’t have to change. It’s easy to quickly extend a meeting to additional co-workers or guests by forwarding the meeting URL or use the meeting tools built-in to a Smart Office UC client. Either way, guests can join with a desktop or mobile client or just a web browser. Once connected, guests can hear and see each other, use group chat for sidebar discussions and, of course, share screens/content.

Ribbon’s Smart Office Collaboration Rooms on Cloud

Ribbon is part of the IBM Public Cloud Ecosystem, a new initiative to support global system integrators (GSIs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to help clients modernize and transform mission-critical workloads on the IBM public cloud.

With Ribbon’s Smart Office Collaboration Rooms on IBM public cloud, organizations can continue to support their customers with its full suite of communications and collaboration tools. Combining IBM’s trusted and secure public cloud environment with the Ribbon advanced unified communications provides enterprise teams with all of the communications tools they need to collaborate, stay productive, and provide their customers with great support—all while maintaining eye contact.

IBM enterprise clients can now leverage Ribbon’s Smart Office Collaboration Rooms as part of a free trial, ending June 30, 2020.

Learn more about IBM public cloud, and visit this page to take advantage of the offer.

Read Ribbon’s recent press release here.