With remote work growing in popularity due to various reasons, employees are enjoying the flexibility but are also feeling disconnected from the rest of the team as if working in a silo. Not being able to see your colleagues’ faces all day, having no corridor greetings, no coffee chats, no watercooler gossip have left people isolated.

The effort to find time in calendars, to set up meetings, and to create and send multiple links for different meetings is ineffective and time-consuming. It deters people that meetings need to be scheduled well ahead of time in order to prepare a room, make sure everyone has the same app downloaded, and to guarantee everyone can attend.

SignalWire Work presents an elegant solution to make remote teams effective, collaborative, and fun. The biggest part of the solution is the ability to see all the rooms on one single page - the homepage. Treat the homepage as your physical office, if you will; you’ll be able to get a complete view of what’s going on in the office - Karl having a meeting with Ben, Sales team pitching a potential client, Marketing team brainstorming next month’s campaign ideas, Heather working alone in her office (room). Being able to see all your colleagues makes you feel included and close to the team.

You can join any of these rooms by simply clicking the Join button. It allows you to join the room for the entire meeting or pop in to discuss a quick matter and pop right out. No meetings need to be scheduled and no invites need to be sent.

You can also create a new room instantly should you want to quickly create a temporary Discussion room. You may invite others to this room by sending them a link or asking them to find the room on the homepage like the rest of the rooms.

Being able to join and create rooms quickly provides employees the confidence to ‘walk around' the office and interact with colleagues for work or to catch up or to share a funny joke.

A bird’s eye view of the rooms on the homepage mimics a real physical office and provides a more natural and human experience.

Working from anywhere is difficult when virtual tools are inconsistent. Links that always change, rigidly scheduled meetings, and calls that end on a timer aren’t conducive to collaborative office environments. In order to successfully work remotely, you need tools that allow you to collaborate your way.

SignalWire Work is a dedicated virtual office space built on the idea of always on rooms. Rooms are just like offices in an IRL building. You can create as many different virtual rooms as you need and customize them to the way your company works best. These rooms can be used to host public or private meetings, hunker down to get some work done, or catch up with your co-workers during breaks.

Rooms are easy to customize to the way you work best. For example, you can create one room for your private office and another as a conference room to host large company meetings and parties! Each room is customizable with its own settings and options, so the possibilities are endless.

Rooms in an IRL office building don’t move around or disappear after midnight, so why would the rooms in your virtual office? Each room is available to you 24/7 and has an invite link that never changes. That means everyone in the company knows exactly where to find you so you can focus on what’s important.

Rooms increase collaboration by crushing the idea that working from home means working in isolation unless you have a meeting scheduled. It’s easy to hop in and out of rooms just like you would in a physical office. For example, if you have a question for the sales team, just jump into the sales room and ask!

In addition to permanent rooms, SignalWire Work also has temporary rooms that can be created on the fly and disappear when nobody is in them. When temporary rooms are enabled, users can type any room name into the dialer and that room will be automatically created. Temporary rooms are a great way to host impromptu breakout sessions and mimic the idea of “stepping out into the hallway” for a quick and private discussion with a colleague.

In these remote times most events are taking place over virtual platforms and most of them offer a contrasting experience from a physical event. One example is of viewing who is at an event before entering the main hall. How many times at a physical event did you enter a room blind without knowing if the room is empty or full?

SignalWire offers this very fundamental problem by offering Video Previews. You can view the live video preview of all the rooms on the homepage; you can see all the attendees in the room, any screen that might be shared, or a live view of a speaker or a host. Having this video preview allows you to get a sneak peek into the room before you join it. It also ensures you join the right room and are prepared to greet everyone - no surprises.

Video Previews is also a great way for the host to feel more connected to the audience and also for the audience to feel connected to each other. Watching them all on the homepage in different rooms gives you an experience that is close to being in a physical space where you can see all the attendees at the same venue. It allows you to drop in to say hi to someone who might be alone in the room or join a room where everyone is laughing to know what the joke was! You do not feel left out and feel very much part of the event, which is critical in a virtual setting.

Room Navigator is an intuitive tool that provides quick access to several room controls, such as, instantly joining or transferring to other rooms and inviting participants to your room, with just a click.

What can you use it for?

Preview of all the rooms

View all rooms, occupied or empty, at one place without having to step out of the existing room. Room preview also includes a video, so you can see who is in which room. Clicking on ‘participants’ option will list the names of the participants in the room.

Find a room

Save time looking for a room by simply searching for it in the search bar. This will show all rooms with names containing the searched word.

Join other rooms

Once you know which room to join, you can instantly be taken to that room by clicking the join button visible for each room.

Transfer to other rooms

You can also transfer one more participant to another room while you can choose to remain in the existing room or not. ‘Transfer’ option allows you to select participants you want to transfer.

Invite others to your room

You can also have one or more people join your room from a different room by selecting and inviting them, eliminating the need to create or send invite links.

Compact view:

Scan all the rooms in a compact view, without the video preview, to see more rooms on one page.

Raise hand is a social tool that notifies all participants in a room that you have something to add to the conversation. Raising your hand highlights your video with a bright green border, making it easy to participate in a discussion without interrupting.

Easily toggle Raise Hand on and off from the control panel at the bottom of the room.

Raising your hand displays your name at the top of the Participant List, making it easy for all members of the room to see who has something to say.

We can’t always interrupt a meeting when we have something to say. Informative add-ons, side conversations, or funny jokes have a place, even when you’re on mute. In fact, having a little bit of fun during work meetings has proven to increase productivity and build a stronger culture.

Our built in Group Chat allows members of a room to communicate with each other through text (and emojis) Group chat is a great way to ask questions during a presentation, collaborate, or even punctuate a moment with a GIF.

When in a meeting with multiple people, you sometimes want to send a message to a single participant without sending it to the other participants in the meeting. An important message, a training tip, a funny joke, are just some of the reasons why you’d need to send a private message to a participant.

Private Voice Messaging allows you to do just that. Using a Private Voice Messaging feature, you can send a voice message to individual participants. You can type the message you wish to send, and the message will be converted to a voice message when the recipient hears it.

There are several use cases where Private Voice Messaging can be essential.

• It can be used to convey an important message in a meeting or presentation without anyone else hearing it.

• This feature is most useful when training a sales rep or a new employee. While on call with a client, the manager can send private voice messages to the trainee to help with the meeting.

• Having a little bit of fun during work meetings has proven to increase productivity and build a stronger culture. Send your colleagues fun quotes and jokes during meetings using the private voice messaging feature.

Easily share your screen with team members for easy collaboration. Share presentations, applications, and even audio.

Share audio

Stream your audio directly through your screen share. Easily share videos and music with your team directly from your web browser.

Control the Layout

Easily control where your screen share appears in the room layout. Make your screen full screen for easy viewing, split the screen with your video for more intimate presentations, or even hide your screen altogether to stream music into the room.

Share an application

Share a specific browser tab or application. It’s easy to share just what you want to. Don’t worry about slack notifications interrupting your presentation.

At SignalWire, we have a video-first culture and with communication tools such as SignalWire Work, we encourage companies to adopt video-first culture to improve productivity, collaboration, and camaraderie within teams. However, video-first culture doesn’t mean you can’t step away from your computer in case someone joins your room and you’re not there.

We have a perfect solution for such a scenario - Text Messaging Notifications. You can set notifications such that you will receive a text message on your phone number when someone joins your room. You can also choose to turn this setting off if you do not wish to receive notifications.

With Text Message Notifications turned on, you can rest assured that you will not miss an important meeting in your room or a colleague who dropped in to say hi.

The text message also includes a link to the room and and a phone number to dial in, in case you’re not at your computer and need to join the room via your phone.

Text Messaging Notifications will make sure you do not miss anyone who come to your room.

Meetings can have a lasting impact beyond what happens live. Don’t want to lose focus by taking notes? Want to record an interview for your YouTube channel? Want to record an all hands meeting for those who can’t attend? No problem, SignalWire Work allows you to locally record any conversation so you don’t miss a thing.

SignalWire Work securely stores all of your recordings on our servers and are easily accessed in the system settings so you can download them later. You can record in multiple rooms at once so that you can preserve all of the important conversations happening in the office.

Our custom layouts, audio and video quality are all preserved in the recording so you can control exactly how you want your recording to look.

Recording helps you:

-Preserve important information so you can focus on the conversation at hand.

-Create presentations, demonstrations, and other reusable content.

-Keep track of meetings without taking up space on your personal hard drive.

Sometimes you just want to take a break from the event and focus on work rather than constant side-chatter. For such a time, you may enable Do Not Disturb that lets other attendees know that you are busy.

When in DND mode, you will not be able to hear anyone in the room. This lets you concentrate on another task at hand. If someone needs you, they can ‘knock’ on your profile to nudge you.

It is a perfect feature when you want to take a break from a day long event or work on something important and yet not leave the event you’re attending.

Different kinds of meetings require different formats; one size does not fit all when it comes to layouts. It can be so frustrating when presenters can’t see their audience or when small discussions only show a few members of the group.

SignalWire Work offers dynamic video layouts for any use case. Layouts control the way user videos are organized within a room and are reflected the same for everyone in a room, that way everyone is seeing the same thing. Layouts range from a grid with everyone on display, to watch parties where users surround a large video in the middle, to presentations where selected users appear larger above an audience. You can learn more about each specific layout here.

Layouts are easy to control, so you can switch back and forth between different layouts as your meeting changes. Design the way your meetings, webinars, or presentations look by highlighting different team members, screen shares, or media.

Layouts increase collaboration because everyone on your team is seeing the same thing. There is no need to scroll through a list of members to see them, everyone is on display making it easier than ever to collaborate from anywhere.

Try the following layouts for your next meeting:

Grid Social

Grid social is perfect for team meetings or impromptu discussions. Your video screens will automatically scale so that every member of the team can be seen!

Stage with Audience

Stage with audience is great for formal presentations. Choose a presenter and their video will be enlarged to put the focus on them with the audience visible below. You can even place a screen share or video next to or below your presenter.

Watch Party

Watch a fun or informative video together as a team! Your chosen media will be largely displayed in the middle of the screen with your audience surrounding it. This is a great way to review media as a group.

Highlight Speaker(s)

Host Q and A sessions or an informal presentation. Whoever is speaking will appear in a larger video at the top with the audience displayed below.

ClipEEze is SignalWire’s version of a reaction GIF. Play short video clips into your room to punctuate a moment or add some pizzazz to your event. ClipEEze can be personalized to reinforce company culture and add interactivity to your space.

Examples of times to use ClipEEze:

• welcoming everyone to a meeting

• expression of a good idea

• applause during a statement of recognition

• to lighten up an otherwise dull moment

• to pull back up to a higher level discussion

• saying "Goodbye" to end the meeting

Upload customized ClipEEze

• Uploading customized ClipEEze is a great way to reinforce company culture, create a sense of comradery, and create those water-cooler moments. Upload short clips from company videos, snippets of pop culture, or even applause for when a moment needs to be celebrated.

Play Full Screen

• ClipEEze can be played within a room layout, as if it is its own participant, or as full screen. This ensures that the clip takes up all of the attention in the room and is especially useful for punctuating big moments like awards or a job well done.

Loop

• Traditionally, a clipEEze plays through one time before it stops automatically. Loop a clipEEze so that it plays indefinitely until you manually tell it to stop.

Find Clips

• Each ClipEEze is sorted by title. Easily find the right ClipEEze at the right moment in the search bar so you never miss a beat.

When in a video conference, often you have to navigate away to other applications or different tabs and it is inefficient to keep switching back to the meeting. This is sometimes not an easy option; for example, when you’re presenting and have to look at a different screen and still want to see the audience.

Picture-in-Picture feature allows you to see your ongoing meeting in a floating window out of the browser, pinned to the corner of your computer screen. You can be interacting with other applications and always have a view of the meeting and the audience.

This gives you the flexibility to navigate away freely without losing touch with the other participants in the meeting.

In a meeting with several participants, especially if they are unfamiliar with each other, your name is often the first connection participants make. Not having names displayed properly and having to search for it makes it cumbersome and ineffective.

Participant Name Tag appears in the lower third section and is a constructive way to display your name. This clearly lets the participants know who you are.

To take it a step further, you may change the Participant Name Tag to display any desired information; be it your name, email address, company name, etc. You can also customize the tag to display a logo (graphic) as well in part of the tag. This could be very useful when there are several participants from different companies; at a glance everyone would be able to see who is from which company and other desired information on the Participant Name Tag.

Push to Talk tool allows you to remain muted throughout an event until you press the button to talk.

Much like a walkie-talkie, you press the button to talk. Keep the button pressed or hold down the spacebar to unmute and talk; stay muted the rest of the time, This tool is particularly useful for noisy backgrounds, where you have to keep muting or unmuting yourself.

Push to Talk is a helpful tool provided as an option in addition to the regular mute/unmute button.

During meetings, we often find ourselves wanting to share media with our colleagues. On SignalWire Work it’s easy to share and watch videos together, whether it be professional or just for fun!

All you need is a YouTube or Vimeo link and you are ready to start playing videos. SignalWire Work plays videos directly into your room so you have complete control over your meeting. Media controls are built into the platform so it’s easy to pause, rewind, stop, and change the volume of your video.

• Playing videos is a great way to add a little bit of fun to your office with company watch watch parties or movie nights.

• Increase collaboration by easily sharing the latest company videos or reviewing in progress work as a group.

Videos can also be set to automatically play once someone has entered a room. This can be a unique way to welcome clients into your lobby or play promotional videos before a meeting.

In a meeting with multiple people, often you want to discuss a quick topic that relates to just 1 or a few participants in the room. Usually you would wait for the meeting to be over to discuss the topic or start an email thread that takes forever and dilutes the importance and urgency of the matter.

Sidebar Conversations are an innovative way to break out and collaborate with your team during meetings. Sidebar Conversations allow you to start a private conversation with select team members all within the same room. Members of a sidebar can only see and hear other members and are able to invite others if the need arises.

As an example, there is a weekly sales sync happening in the sales room that has about 30 participants who take turns giving an update on their current leads. One member of the sales team, Sarah, has an urgent question for her colleague Nigel that can’t wait until after the call. Sarah can invite Nigel to a sidebar conversation and ask him her question without having to exit the sales sync or send him an email that may or may not be seen in time. The rest of the participants in the sales room won’t be able to hear Sarah and Nigel’s discussion, so they can continue their sync without distraction.

Sidebar Conversations make it easy to break off from a larger group and collaborate without the hassle of creating or moving rooms. Sidebars make it easy to quickly solve problems with team members without disrupting the energy of the rest of the room.

Contact us now to learn more about Sidebar Conversations.

It is a well-acknowledged fact that branding establishes an identity that sets itself apart and sparks a connection with its audience. The importance of branding is undeniable making it imperative to leave no stone unturned when it comes to making a mark.

Having customized headers and footers at the homepage is the first touchpoint where companies can create an impact and leave a memorable impression on their guests. When guests visit your homepage, they can see your logo or sponsor logo or any graphic on the top of the page and as well as at the bottom of the page. This creates a sense of familiarity and also lets guests know that they are on the right page.

Customizing these headers and footers to a fun graphic can also be a creative way to get more eyeballs and interaction on your homepage.

Like a physical office, SignalWire Work also has the concept of different rooms in its virtual office environments where people speak collaboratively in meetings. Just as customizing headers and footers is important to let guests know that they are in the right place, customizing room descriptions is helpful in letting people know they are in the right room.

A room could be someone’s office, a conference room, a sales lobby, a lounge, or anything you want. With so many rooms having clear room names and room descriptions make it easy to find the right room. The description could explain what the room is meant for, or you can also get creative and have fun with it! Marketing Room - This is where the magic happens.

Videos can also be set to automatically play once someone has entered a room. This can be a unique way to welcome clients into your lobby or play promotional videos before a meeting.

Moderators are participants in SignalWire Work who have been given privileges to control in-room features. Moderators typically get their access rights by being assigned a moderator PIN to specific rooms or the system moderator PIN for auto-created rooms.

There are several controls that moderators have including the ability to make any other participant in the meeting a moderator on the go with a click of a button. This is especially useful when there are several presenters as it takes the pressure off to assign roles beforehand.

Moderators can also transfer selected or all participants from one room to another. This makes the experience seamless for the guests as they reach the designated meeting rooms without having to lift a finger.

Auto Shuffle is another feature that is accessible to the moderators. It shuffles participants' videos automatically, every few seconds. This is particularly helpful to give everyone facetime, when not everyone's video fits on one screen.

Other controls that moderators have include audio and video muting or unmuting selected or all participants, addressing and lowering raised hands of the participants, changing video layouts, recording the meeting, enabling ClipEEze, and many more!

Having moderator permission provides you access to several features that give you control of the meeting.

Moderators can transfer selected or all participants from one room to another. This makes the experience seamless for the guests as they reach the designated meeting rooms without having to lift a finger.

There are several controls that moderators have including the ability to make any other participant in the meeting a moderator on the go with a click of a button. This is especially useful when there are several presenters as it takes the pressure off to assign roles beforehand.

During large meetings and presentations, it can be frustrating when speakers can’t see their audience and only themselves and audience members are less inclined to pay attention when they can’t be seen. For those instances when there are more people than there is room on a screen, auto shuffle is a great option.

When there are too many participants to be displayed at once, auto shuffle gives each audience member a turn to be seen. Auto shuffle will automatically cycle through which participants are shown in the audience area of a layout.

For large meetings like company all-hands, auto shuffle is a great way to keep your audience engaged because they are active members of the meeting rather than flies on the screen (get it?)

In today’s world where more and more companies and institutions are operating in a virtual environment, it is important that controls are in place to ensure security and privacy. Especially if a screen or a document is being shared that is not meant for eyes outside of the meeting participants, it becomes imperative to secure the meeting.

SignalWire offers several security features that will ensure that no sensitive content is being misused and no unwanted participant is intruding on a meeting.

Moderators of a room can add a PIN to the room and only after someone enters the correct PIN can they be allowed to join the meeting, while others will be only able to see the preview on the homepage. This creates a layer of security to ensure that people who are not meant to be in the meeting are filtered out as they will not have the PIN information.

Sometimes, it might be necessary to lock the room altogether to disallow anyone to enter the room. This is especially useful if you’re having an important meeting (sales pitch, board meeting, etc) and do not want any interruptions. A moderator can lock and unlock the room during the meeting depending on the situation. It'll appear on the homepage as a locked room and no one will be able to join it without permission.

If the meeting is of sensitive nature and there is no need for anyone to be aware of the meeting, moderators can also hide the room altogether. This option will hide the room from the homepage and no participant will be able to search for the room or join it. Moderators can unhide a room as easily as they hide it

You can use any of these features to ensure the security and privacy of a meeting room and rest assured that there will be no interruptions or disturbance. You are protected with industry-leading security that uses the same ciphers that are used by leading financial institutions.

Moderators of a room can add a PIN to the room and only after someone enters the correct PIN can they be allowed to join the meeting, while others will be only able to see the preview on the homepage. This creates a layer of security to ensure that people who are not meant to be in the meeting are filtered out as they will not have the PIN information.

Sometimes, it might be necessary to lock the room altogether to disallow anyone to enter the room. This is especially useful if you’re having an important meeting (sales pitch, board meeting, etc) and do not want any interruptions. A moderator can lock and unlock the room during the meeting depending on the situation. It'll appear on the homepage as a locked room and no one will be able to join it without permission.

If the meeting is of sensitive nature and there is no need for anyone to be aware of the meeting, moderators can also hide the room altogether. This option will hide the room from the homepage and no participant will be able to search for the room or join it. Moderators can unhide a room as easily as they hide it.