Raise Hand Feature in BlueJeans

Stuart Minchington, Manager, Premium Support

1,010 Points

Thank you for the feedback, Rob!
Our chat feature can help facilitate this type of scenario. We also support the use of emoticons like (thumbsup) and (thumbsdown) to agree/disagree on a given topic. I have attached a screenshot, so that you can see it in action.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.

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Community Team, Community Admin

5,652 Points

Hi Rob -

The "raise hand" feature is really synonymous with older web conferencing solutions. However, when Blue Jeans extends beyond our 100 participant capacity we will be addressing this user experience to make it easy for the participant, but also for the moderator.

@Stuart is 100% correct, our chat feature is perfect for this in addition to the participant physically raising their hand on video.

Here are the shortcuts for emoticons.

Thank you Rob!

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Rob Corrao

460 Points

The challenge we run into is when we have a large group, the moderator is typically trying to mute and unmute people who forget to do that themselves and so isn't looking at the screen. We also use bluejeans through our Tely - so on a large room TV system mixed with browsers. Our moderator is typically in the conf room with the room system being controlled by the moderator screen. So the moderator would have to be jumping back and forth between the chat and list of people... I suppose that it is something that could work; however, what I was envisioning was more of a feature that would allow a hand raise by a person or room, which would then put a 1 next to their name, the next to raise, a 2 and so on...so that after the person talking was done, it was clear to the room who was next so that people wouldn't try and jump in - stepping on each other. There is a lot of "no no - you go ahead" that takes unnecessary time in our larger format meetings.

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2014-07-10T18:56:40+00:00

Andrea, Champion

976 Points

This even cropped up during the Blue Jeans Couch Chat w/ CEO Krish Ramakrishnan this week. I raised my hand to speak, but someone had already jumped in, so I sat back to wait until he finished. Before he was done, another attendee raised HIS hand - and this time the moderator noticed, so I missed my opportunity to speak (until after the topic had moved on). If the system recognized the sequence of attendees waiting to speak, it would be very helpful.

2014-07-10T19:10:58+00:00

Brett Smith

2,672 Points

Thanks Andrea! We saw that first hand as well. Thanks again for attending the session your input was well received. Stay tuned for an official response from our product team on this.

2014-07-10T19:35:08+00:00

Andrea, Champion

976 Points

First hand....is that a pun? ;-)

2014-10-23T14:26:37+00:00

Nathan Maharaj

782 Points

Yeah, I generally find chat to be not very well integrated into the call experience. There's a burden on each user to keep an eye on it, rather than chat contributing to the meeting on even footing.

2018-05-13T00:45:30+00:00

egy team

62 Points

Andrea, Champion

976 Points

I would like to see that option as well! The majority of our users are on laptops, with microphones muted....so it's a bit of a knee jerk reaction to hit the spacebar when someone would like to add a comment, but messy when there are more than one wanting to speak.

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Jeremy Mehaffey

364 Points

We just ran into this "issue" today on a large conference that we were hosting. We opened up to QA at the end of the meeting and it was everything we could do to control mics as the moderator. When we missed a user the audio started cutting in and out really bad.

Some way to control the mics as well as see who has a question chronologically on the same screen would be REALLY helpful. We have another conference like the one today coming up in a couple weeks and I am going to have to work really hard with the other users to make sure QA runs smoother than it did today. Any assistance or update on this would be appreciated.

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Tom Griner, Audio Specialist

410 Points

If all the 'endpoints' are behaving well you shouldn't end up encountering audio that cuts in and out so much. Until such time as there is a better "raise hand" feature, you could try to track down the cause of the audio cut outs. Was a poor network connection involved? A troublesome audio device that could be reconfigured or replaced?

Was this a meeting with a bunch of AVer EVC100s participating? If so, do you know what kind of speakers were being used?

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Jeremy Carter, CTS, Champion

886 Points

Raise Hand function has become extremely important for us, we need it desperately.

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Brian

524 Points

Hey I was wondering if there was an update on this post. We are just getting in to our blue jeans set up and would love to know whats up and coming for this feature.

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Community Team, Community Admin

5,652 Points

Hi Brian - no updates right now. Tom's post is still valid today but we are tracking the engineering team's progress and as soon as we have news, we will update this thread. Thanks for your patience!

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American Councils

110 Points

Hi,

Any update on this? The problem with doing this through the chat feature is that there is no way of tracking who has been addressed. There is no queue created only a string of people in the chat that may have questions/comments. If multiple people want to ask questions AND there are people chatting, the moderators job becomes a full time line moderator. If they are also the one answering questions, this quickly becomes chaotic.

Mark

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Brett Smith

2,672 Points

@Mark - Thanks for the additional information. We will check on this ASAP and have an answer back shortly. Thanks for your patience, we certainly understands this makes large meetings with active chat to moderator difficult.

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David Bernholdt

190 Points

I would like to have a "raise hand" signal that's distinct from the chat tool. Particularly, I'd like to have the option to have it show up on the current presenter's screen (as currently happens with the video stream). In my experience, the "moderator" is often mostly paying attention to the presentation, like everyone else in the meeting, not paying attention to the chat stream.

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Craig Ernst, Champion

2,458 Points

I've been told that I need to chime in here as well. We need this ability, even for smaller sessions. Moderators need to be able to address those who have a question in an orderly fashion. Tracking names of people as they chat that they have a questions isn't acceptable for this.

To add to this I would like to see an option to raise hand added the meeting control menu of a video conferencing system as well as maybe a two character code from a phone to raise that participants hand as well.

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Denison Wright

102 Points

The "raise hand" feature is also important for us and would be a very welcome feature if/when it's offered. The chat-style raise hand capability doesn't solve the use case we're looking for. What we need is some kind of indication that a hand is raised when the Participant List is collapsed and an indication next to the attendee's name who has raised his/her hand when the Participant List is expanded. If multiple people have raised their hand, then an indication of order is important.

We use BlueJeans for internal company meetings, we are a highly distributed company, so the lack of this feature makes the meeting experiences less optimal, leading to a somewhat aggressive meeting culture where people need to interrupt other people to be able to get a word in at the appropriate point in a meeting, etc. The "hand raise" feature would improve meeting coordination and culture.

If this isn't a feature a lot of people need, make it configurable so that those who need it for their meetings can set it up.

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Video Zuyd

90 Points

I totally agree with early-er comments. hand raise is a must! Not in the chat, or on another way around but an easy way to use. I hope to haer soon!!!

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Radhika@BJsupport, Official Rep

6,544 Points

Hi Video,

Currently we support raise hand feature in our primetime product. Attendees can “raise their hand” if they want to interact live in the meeting (be able to speak and be seen).

Image: https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/1616392/28600-puzdkl_inline.png?1498816007

Image: https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/1616392/28600-puzdkl_inline.png?1498816007

I can take this as a feature request for our standard meetings.

Thank you,

Radhika Chatur

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