January 2021 update (participant management)

Public-i would like to wish everyone a happy new year 2021. This year starts with new lockdown measures and it is becoming clear that although most of our clients are thinking ahead and looking into hybrid solutions, we are going to continue with fully remote participation for a while yet.

The good news is that our Connect Remote product keeps improving and is now a great solution for large meetings.

Participant management tab

We have added a new tool that is going to make life easier for managing speakers in a remote meeting. The new View participants list button in the bottom left corner shows a complete list of all the participants in the meeting.

Meeting moderators are shown at the top of the list. Participants are then listed as follows: the current speaker first, then any participants who have raised their hand because they wish to speak, then the rest of the participants in A-Z order.

We have also added a filter to gain quick access to a participant by searching for their name. As a moderator, you can then use the usual 3 dot menu to access functionality like mute or stop their video.

Large meeting optimisations

We find that the tile view which shows all participants in a grid can be very resource hungry and that is why we are now disabling it automatically for meetings larger than 50 people.

Laptop participants will still be able to use the list to understand who is in the meeting and who is waiting to speak. We are planning to bring this feature to tablet users as soon as possible.

We have also optimised the voting feature for large meetings so that it now uses less internet bandwidth. This will help to ensure that all participants can vote successfully. To benefit from this, please get your participants to update to the latest version of the Connect Remote application on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

Publish a meeting automatically

It is now possible to archive a meeting automatically so that the public can watch it again. After stopping the live stream you can now press the Publish button and the meeting with be available online a few minutes later.

Our focus is now shifting to hybrid meetings, where some participants are in a room and some are joining remotely. Our new Hybrid Link solution will combine the video conferencing tools of Connect Remote with the microphone and speaker management features of SpaceManager.

Late January

• Improved tablet interface (new leave button and chat notifications) [CR]
• Participant list on tablet [CR]

February

• Hybrid meeting queue and vote management (see Hybrid link for more information) [SM+CR]
• Paginated tile view (to see everyone even in large meetings) [CR]
• Vote improvements (check individual votes, share vote results at the end) [CR]

March-April

• Export chat data and participant attendance [CR]
• Lobby improvements (lobby participants can follow the proceedings) [CR]
• Individual invites (added security and deeper integration with Mod.Gov and CMIS) [CR]
• Voting feature for those dialling in to the meeting (using number pad) [CR]

May-June

• Break out rooms [CR]
• Standalone laptop application to open meetings easily [CR]
• End-to-end encryption [CR]

note: [CR]=Connect Remote, [SM]=Space Manager