What about team workspaces?

Was that a legitimate question Tim?

Whiteboard gone, screen sharing gone, Big ass video screen that warns you about allowing camera and mic in browser but when you click it it never asks to connect to a camera, in either chrome, firefox or opera browsers. Tested with 2 separate clients. I can chat and maybe share files but i might as well carry on using skype for that and at least i can get video too..

In 16 at least it was working and a bit more intuitive to use, now it is nothing like the help file or video webinar/tutorials out there and is not working at all with the functions left.

If there are hidden settings i need to set to make it work then please let me know and i'll test it but otherwise it's broken for me and on 2 separate clients installs.

Karl,

I overlooked the fact that your post was just to BITCH and I tried to be helpful, even though your provided NO INFORMATION!

Then you follow being even more sarcastic.

As the CEO, I'm pretty damn busy but thought I would reach out and see if I could provide some help.  

You let me know how you want to proceed because I would be more than happy to just delete this thread and spend time answering questions for customers who appreciate it.

We use the team workspaces in SM17 without issues... Video and voice work fine on my end, though we are on a higher build than the RTM release.

When I join with chrome I get a prompt asking me to allow access to webcam / microphone. Tested with Chrome, Edge and Firefox. We have quite a large number of clients who use it and have never reported any issues. Though we do have clients that miss the whiteboard and screen sharing feature.

SM16 integrated with a 3rd party product though and wasnt a native feature. Screen sharing though would need a 3rd party product (which I am against) or, ST would have to roll their own, which is a lot of time and effort and money spent. 

Update... apologies, it did indeed login... took 40mins! and the camera has become available in opera.

Tim,

I saw the other recent post that mentions why the parts to workspace were removed. I believe something got broken when you removed the whiteboard and screen sharing along with anything else that may have been disabled or removed as i can now no longer log in to the team workspace from the internet side (using current build), it continues to show "logging you in" but never does. (before you ask it worked in later builds of 16) if i open the workspace from within the network i cannot access the camera.. Considering what you are working on with MAPI i am just going to wait until that becomes available and stable before telling my clients to use something that currently isn't working and may change how workspace functions under MAPI anyway. In the meantime i will make use of other options and hope they don't tell me again to dump smartermail. (this will be the 3rd time)

P.S i know this is not a direct paid for support ticket forum and i almost never "bitch" but i get frustrated when asking relevant questions that are ignored and further, parts of the software that previously worked i find out have been removed after upgrading.

You maybe the CEO but the rest of us out here are also CEO's, IT consultants, network admins, skilled technicians (i happen to be all of those) and IT being the way it is need hands in many fires to stay abreast of all options available for our staff, employers, clients, customers etc.

All it needed for IMAP SASL implementation answer is Yes, after MAPI or no not going to happen... seeing as it's a requirement of multiple mailbox archiving in smartermail as-is i thought it important.

Reviewing attachments prior to sending is a basic requirement of busy people sending out documents that might start MH-DFTops.pdf and you might want to make sure the right one is attached prior to sending. It was mentioned as being proposed (in 2017) an answer to what's the progress would have been nice.

Karl, There were many discussions related to the changes in Team Workspaces from 16.x to 17.x.  You can look in the community for those threads which will have more details. 

A quick answer:  We integrated a third party service in previous versions that was FREE.  That company decided to drastically change that service, so we wrote our own.  FYI, building a WebRTC video conferencing solution is not easy and it's part of the reason why our competitors haven’t done it. Keep in mind, there are companies that only provide Video conferencing because it is that difficult. 

At this time, we do not know of any bugs or issues related to Team Workspaces that would prevent you from using it.  Edge is a problem because it doesn’t fully support WebRTC but Edge is a disaster and Microsoft is moving to chromium. 

We allow our employees to work two days from home each week.  We require our employees to be on Video Conferencing the entire time and we use Team Workspaces to do that.  Our employees use essentially every OS and Browser and we don’t see issues.  I did see a new post today about Opera and Audio not working.  Again, we are not aware of an issue but we also do not use Opera much internally.   

If any customer is seeing an issue with Team Workspaces, please submit a ticket.  That is a nice thing about our new Maintenance and Support, there is no cost to submit them. 

With regards to SASL, we do not have any plans to implement it.  It was developed around 2006 and hasn’t been widely used.  There are limited implementations and in most cases, there are a lot of issues and incompatibilities in these implementations.  I’m not sure the reference to multi-mailbox archiving?  Are you talking about the archiving capabilities in SmarterMail? 

With regards to reviewing attachments before sending, it is something we may introduce in the future but it is incredibly difficult based on how our draft system was developed.  When we do implement more preview capabilities for other file types other than images, we will review if we can implement it in the compose area.

Finally, we attempt to keep up with community topics and change them when items are completed, in progress, and planned, etc.  This isn’t a main source of support but we understand people appreciate the response and we do our best to keep up with it.  But one of the major reasons to implement Maintaince and Support was to allow customers to better communicate with support when they need direct answers from SmarterTools.

Lastly, I can tell there are things YOU WANT that may not have been implemented or answered but there are thousands of things that have been replied to, fixed, implemented and added etc.  Were releasing products every couple weeks with new features and functionality.  Customers don't need to wait six to eight months for new functionality and its released as we product it and QC it etc.  Were moving incredibly quick and provide a lot of value for what customers pay for SmarterMail especially compared to the prices of our competitors.

And regarding your references to MAPI, please see on the more recent and larger threads on that.  MAPI is a mind blowing and we will be the only company other than Exchange to have native MAPI.  I promised a response and posted it tonight.

Tim, what issues are with Edge? We havent had any major complaints about it, our tests have shown it works, though it does have some weird stuttering and some other issues with audio, but nothing crazy.

Chris, that's about what we would expect with the addition of possible connection issues when people join.  It would be a much better experience on Chrome and Firefox because their implementations are far better.  In our case we care about CPU more than anything because we often have six or more people in a meeting and we have a good number of people using HP X360's that aren't CPU powerhouses but they love the portability and the flexibility of the laptops.

Thank you for the more detailed answer Tim, much appreciated and the reasoning is fully understood (now)

I do use addins in the 3 browsers that are used (Edge is never used) so i will get the users to disable those before accessing the workspace.

SASL is used by MailStore, a separate archiving program that integrates with exchange better than smartermail but i got it to work without SASL. I know smartermail has archiving but MailStore integrates with Outlook and has archive searching, access, reply etc from within the archive plus other legal retention rules..

It was my intention when installing smartermail that it replace exchange and do away with Outlook and have a seamless across the board usage that clients could use at home and the office.... it has just turned into the backend for Outlook, mainly because of the things smartermail can't do that Outlook can, despite me trying to sell the things that smartermail can do. Mapi may make big changes in that.

Tim,

I wanted to let you know that I saw some of the fixes in the new build that I pointed out in my posts on Workspace in the other thread. I have not yet updated to the new build as scheduled maintenance is not until next week so cannot say if it's all fixed but I at least thank you for looking in that area and fixing what you might have found which by the description also matches the problems I reported.

Karl, 

Moved your post to the Workspaces thread.  

Hope everything looks good when you upgrade.

There are updates to our documentation as well regarding browser limitations as well based off our recent evaluations.

Team Workspaces would be incredibly powerful if screen sharing was integrated. Is that on a roadmap somewhere that we missed?

Michael,

A Year ago I asked Smartermail Support about screen sharing and get such response: 

"Unfortunately, there is no way to do screen sharing in Team Workspaces at this time. Support for screen sharing by the browsers is currently limited and prevents us from being able to properly integrate it. Google Chrome requires every user to install an extension, and that extension has to be custom made to support the domains it will run on. Firefox does not require an extension, however its ability to capture windows is unreliable at the moment. Other browsers, such as Edge, Opera, and Safari do not currently support screen sharing. 

If browser support for screen sharing improves in the future, we will reevaluate integrating this feature."

Karl, you're not alone, I too have issues with the "Join video chat" button only showing me the "Unable to access camera" warning and never actually asking me to allow it.

This is on iPad, so I assume that maybe something to do with the default browser?

Whiteboard and screen sharing would be nice but chat & video essential really in the current climate and I've not been able to get it working yet.

Build 7242

Am I doing anything wrong?

PS. If I use my desktop (Mac) it says that my browser doesn't support video conferencing please update to the latest version of Chrome. I am at the latest version.

Anthony, one thing you might want to try on this is ensuring your Site Settings allow for video/audio recording via the site. Clicking on the lock icon next to the URL in Google Chrome should bring up a menu option where you can then click Site Settings and change the Camera and Microphone options to Allowed. 

These settings typically require the web interface be secured by an SSL certificate beforehand, and the Site Settings procedure might differ depending on your device or browser. We're doing some internal evaluations now on what security/network constraints might have an affect on results and we hope to have updates on this in the near future as well. 

Hi ST team... We have been constantly asking about the future of Team workspaces regarding screen sharing. Is this something we will see in the near future?

Also, one of the issues we have is that the current Team workspaces doesnt have an option to select the camera that we want to use.  Every other videoconferencing solution works fine and lets our users select a camera, but not Team Worksp.   Is this being addressed?

Thanks

Jorge

Thanks for the reply Kyle, Therein lies your first problem I think.

The software doesn't initiate the "ask if you can use the camera or microphone" and that's why it doesn't work on the iPhone or Ipad (for me) - its also not as easy to find those settings on iPad, etc.

I shouldn't have to ask all of the people who want to conference call to go into their settings to allow for the camera or mic to be used, that should happen automatically as with other sites. Some of these people struggle to open a browser, if I ask them to go into settings there will be a whole new world of headaches to deal with ;o)

Thanks