During the exceptional period of the coronavirus episode and with all duty travel on behalf of CERN suspended as of Wednesday 11 March 2020 until further notice, video conference is an excellent way to keep the collaborative effort flowing.

With many more people than usual using the CERN video conference service especially for large meetings, the service load will increase drastically.

In order to maintain a responsive and fully functioning service, as well as to contain costs, we ask the video conference users to schedule any new Vidyo meeting or Vidyo meeting series, whenever possible, outside of the 14:00-17:30 CET/CEST time frame, which is traditionally the most loaded period of the day. For remote meetings involving participants in the Geneva timezone, please schedule them preferably in the morning (Geneva time).

A simple and practical measure which will also help with the load is to remain muted (especially in video) when transmission is not necessary.

If at some point your connection to the meeting with a Vidyo desktop client is failing, please try connecting with the webRTC client or even with a phone.

If you need audio/video conference involving a small number of participants, you may also consider using Skype for Business or any of other widely available voice-call apps instead of Vidyo.

Please check the following links to help you set-up your video conferences:

• Vidyo: http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/services/fe/vidyo
• Skype for Business: http://information-technology.web.cern.ch/services/Lync-Service

Although we have taken contingency actions in order to cope with the increased load, these simple measures may avoid unnecessary costs for CERN while maintaining the full quality of the video conference service.

Thank you for your understanding. 

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