New features and improvements in this release

There are several modifications to the Base theme and improvements to how some layout features are displayed:

• The Base theme has a new default background image that is used on splash screens. Also, most of the splash screens (such as the Welcome screen shown below) no longer display any overlay graphics/icons by default, but they still display any text-based messages, such as "Welcome".

  

  The PIN entry screens and "no presentation" screen do still display overlay icons as per previous releases.

• The in-conference indicators and messages that are shown in the "notch" at the top of the layout (which indicate states such as a locked conference, raised hands etc), have been improved:

  • The notch now has a line separator between indicators with associated numbers and those without numbers. It also has a more subtle border and tint.

  • Some of the icons used in the notch (raised hand, locked conference, recording/streaming) have been updated, and the expanded in-conference message indicators now have a translucent fill, for improved accessibility. For example:

    

    
• When using participant pinning, you can now customize via themes a slot's appearance when there are no participants found.

• If you have a multiscreen system:

  • The second screen can now be customized via themes to show an image or background of your choice when it is not being used to display conference content. A black screen is used by default.
  • You can now display conference participants across both screens when using a 3x3, 4x4 or 5x5 layout, in addition to the previously supported layouts. If you are using a 4x4 or 5x5 layout then dual screen mode displays 3x3 on both screens.

Conference layouts and speaker names

Base theme and other preconfigured themes

Pinning participants to the layout during a conference

Customizing the unused screen in a dual-screen system

Multiscreen participant display

Local and external policy has the following additions:

• In participant policy you can now override whether the participant is enabled for multiscreen participant display, and whether they receive presentation as part of the layout mix.

There are several improvements and updates to themes and splash screens:

• There is a new configurable unused_screen splash screen within the theme configuration file that defines the appearance of an unused second screen in multiscreen systems.
• "Inter" is now the default font for overlay text (splash screen text and in-conference messages).
• The text and background colors of the messages when the layout notch is in light mode can be customized via a new light_mode field in the indicator_color_config setting in the theme configuration file.
• Within a pinning configuration file you can now override the default behavior of what is displayed in an unused slot. You do this on a per-slot basis by defining a reserved_appearance dictionary for a slot.
• Many of the overlay icon SVG files that are used by splash screens now contain empty/blank images. However, they are still referenced by the splash screens for backwards compatibility, but as they are blank by default they do not affect each screen's new default appearance in version 37 (which many now typically only show a background image and a text label).

Rules and requirements for customized themes

With the release of AIMS v1, live captions is no longer a tech preview feature.

The live captions feature requires integration with a Pexip Private AI platform. For full details, see Pexip Private AI and AIMS.

Live captions (Global settings)

Enabling live captions

One-Touch Join has the following improvements:

• You can now elect to bypass a configured web proxy for One-Touch Join connections to the Exchange server and to Microsoft Graph.
• You can now change the domain used to connect to the Webex API from the default if, for example, you are using Webex for Government.

Using a web proxy

Cisco Webex Cloud configuration

Enabling authentication (One-Touch Join)

Enabling authentication (Scheduling)

This release contains the following administrative improvements:

• Improved account selection for administrator access via OIDC:

  • When configuring the OpenID Connect service, you can specify a Domain hint to pass to the service as a hint to the expected login account.
  • When logging into the Management Node via OIDC you now have the ability to log out of the OIDC service and to select a different account.
• There are two new administrator permissions that are dedicated to managing user groups: May view user groups and May modify user groups. This allows a service account used by the VMR portal for Management Node API access to have a more limited scope of permissions (previously it required full access to all system configuration).
• You can now use the management command API to submit a background backup or snapshot creation request.
• When creating a diagnostic graph there is a new developer.mediaload.framerate_factor metric. This represents the factor by which the video framerate is adjusted to reduce CPU consumption.

Managing administrator access via OIDC

Managing administrator roles

Deploying the VMR self-service portal

Management command API

Creating and viewing diagnostic graphs