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BlueJeans Announces “Next-Generation BlueJeans” Suite and Google Glass Partnership
On October 8, 2021, BlueJeans by Verizon announced their “Next-Generation BlueJeans” suite and partnership with Google Glass. The Next-Generation suite ties BlueJeans Meetings to two new products: BlueJeans Spaces and BlueJeans Collab Board. This suite’s launch follows a key trend that BlueJeans highlighted in their 2021 Hybrid Work Survey: 4.5 times more respondents are interested in virtual workspaces than unified calling and meetings apps (n=4,537) for enabling remote work.
BlueJeans Spaces is a dynamic virtual office, providing a 2D/3D immersive workspace and digital hub to better connect hybrid workers. Users can access a birds-eye 2D view of their office space or a 3D wayfinder view, with interactive elements to meet with various colleagues. This includes watercooler options, meeting at virtual desks, or other key office locations. Users can connect via audio at these meet-up spots alongside persistent 1:1, multi-party, and space-based chat.
BlueJeans Collab Board is a persistent digital canvas. It’s an evolution of existing BlueJeans whiteboarding capabilities and now offers capabilities for an infinite canvas, the ability for up to 25 users to co-create simultaneously, and a wide range of drawing and ideation tools.
BlueJeans Meetings and Events have also received updates. BlueJeans Meetings can now host up to 1,000 active participants in a meeting, deliver open breakout room sessions, and provide an audio lock to hard-mute all participants at once. BlueJeans Events can now support up to 150,000 interactive event participants and offers closed caption translation support in 70 languages, simultaneous interpretation capabilities, and emeddable recordings for on-demand viewing.
BlueJeans has also partnered with Google Glass, providing a see-what-I-see experience for frontline workers. Included capabilities are tools for image sharpening, modifying color contrast, and 5x zoom. Supplied QR codes also aim to improve the ease of joining a meeting.
Our Take
BlueJeans by Verizon continues to maintain a competitive offering in the collaboration tool marketspace, with exciting innovations and delivering on roadmap items. BlueJeans Spaces in particular will be a welcome addition for Verizon customers, especially given the need for accommodating and making accessible hybrid work for employees in and out of the office. This is alongside BlueJeans’ continued advances with their Meetings solution – so much so that SoftwareReviews now considers BlueJeans Meetings a market leader in the web and video conferencing space.
Source: SoftwareReviews Web and Video Conferencing Data Quadrant. Accessed October 25, 2021.
Of course, simply implementing the digital workspace solution without a strategy for its governance could mean poor adoption or misuse. Leverage Info-Tech’s Build a Digital Workspace Strategy research to build out what kind of requirements your organization would actually have with regards to a digital workspace. Understanding your use cases for how employees would interact with and get value out of the digital workspace will help align the solution with your business goals. Remote work cannot be built on technology alone.