RingCentral Announces Innovations to Supercharge Enterprise Communications and Hybrid Work

RingCentral, a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced a range of new capabilities to help organizations run and grow their business by enabling employees to communicate and collaborate effectively, securely, and productively from anywhere.

Nat Natarajan, executive vice president, Products and Engineering, at RingCentral, said, “RingCentral is continuing to innovate at a rapid pace and we’re focused on providing the capabilities that organizations need to run and grow their business. We’re moving from a pandemic which challenged organizations’ basic ability to keep their people connected to a new era of organizational transformation, which requires highly integrated immersive video with team messaging and robust phone capabilities so people can be productive. Additionally, our focus on security gives customers the peace of mind that their communications are fully safe and secure, and an open ecosystem that enables them to co-create solutions to meet their business needs of today and the future.”

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New security and compliance including Dynamic End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) and C5:2020 certification deliver the highest-levels of data protection and secure video meetings. Dynamic E2EE for video meetings allows users to start ad-hoc and scheduled E2EE meetings, and to dynamically turn E2EE on (or off) mid-meeting across mobile, desktop, and web browsers. Dynamic E2EE provides an extra layer of security and confidentiality in addition to RingCentral’s existing security and encryption to mitigate risk and protect sensitive meeting content. Dynamic E2EE open beta will start in September 2021, with general availability planned for October 2021. The C5 criteria (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue) specifies minimum requirements for secure cloud computing and is primarily aimed at professional cloud providers, their auditors, and customers. Today, RingCentral is announcing that RingCentral Message Video Phone™ (MVP™), RingCentral Video Pro™, RingCentral Video Pro+™, RingCentral Engage Digital™, and RingCentral Engage Voice™ are compliant with C5:2020 from the Federal Office for Information Security in Germany (BSI Germany).

Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst at Metrigy, said, “E2EE is a critical requirement to support a Zero Trust security architecture. More than 40 percent of our research participants classify it as a ‘must have’ feature for their collaboration applications. RingCentral’s Dynamic E2EE provides an additional layer of security to ensure that only authorized meeting participants have access to video and associated content.”

New Add-ins with popular third-party applications and developer tools

RingCentral Add-ins bring the applications users depend on into the RingCentral App, giving them a rich, embedded experience. From streamlining signatures to capturing engineering tasks, customers can have an interactive app experience directly within their messaging app, without toggling between multiple screens and applications. Along with over 250 apps in RingCentral’s App Gallery, there will be new Add-in Apps from Akazio, Asana, BugSnag, DocuSign, Github, Hubspot, Jira, Keeper AI, Prodoscore, RingClone, and Trello. As a commitment to innovation, the majority of the initial set of Add-ins will be built by RingCentral Labs, which is a nimble, internal program that empowers RingCentral employees to develop and share their own applications with its customer community. RingCentral Add-in integrations will be generally available in mid-October 2021, but developers can start building now.

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, said, “There’s no room for companies with walled gardens in today’s day and age and RingCentral is a great example of an organization that, by far, has the most open platform in the industry and is truly dedicated to improving workflows and enhancing productivity. With RingCentral Add-ins, developers will have an opportunity to build great integrations for their organizations, and employees will have the ability to work from a single application as opposed to having to toggle between multiple applications and wasting time that could be spent doing things that truly matter.”

New RingCentral for Microsoft Teams embedded dialer

RingCentral for Microsoft Teams brings robust, enterprise-grade phone capabilities directly to the Microsoft Teams app with the new embedded dialer. With RingCentral’s softphone now available within the Microsoft Teams app, customers enjoy the ability to seamlessly place calls, view call history, and view synced RingCentral contacts directly within the Microsoft Teams app, without needing the Microsoft Phone System license to enable external PSTN calling. Building on RingCentral’s existing offerings of Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams – a direct routing integration, RingCentral for Microsoft Teams, and RingCentral for Microsoft 365, RingCentral provides customers with the flexibility and options they need to be successful using whichever tools they choose. The embedded dialer will be available in Q3. For more information download RingCentral for Microsoft Teams.

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Jon Arnold, principal, J Arnold & Associates, said, “While Microsoft Teams includes several collaboration essentials, telephony isn’t one of them and calling is still one of the most important communications tools used by businesses globally. With the RingCentral dialer embedded within Teams, users now have access to all the calling capabilities they need directly within the Teams app so they no longer have to make do with a ‘good enough’ solution and toggle between multiple applications to get their work done.”

New capabilities for RingCentral MVP bring effortless productivity for everyone

RingCentral is delivering a range of new capabilities including:

Video: New immersive video enhancements improve in-meeting experiences:

• Presentation modes: New presentation modes use artificial intelligence (AI) to make presentations more immersive, engaging, and fun with first-of-its-kind presentation modes that enable users to put themselves behind their content, making it more engaging. Users can also place themselves in a virtual conference room to provide a common experience wherever they are.
• Touch-up appearance: RingCentral offers a new “touch-up appearance” capability on the web, mobile, and desktop app that adds a bit more fun and polish to video meetings by turning on the “touch up my skin” feature. On the mobile app, users can soon put on virtual makeup, color their lips, spruce up their eye lashes, and whiten their teeth.
• Auto-framing: Users are now the center of attention no matter where they are on camera with the new AI-based auto-framing capability.
• Breakout Rooms: Breakout Rooms help meeting hosts split up participants into different groups, all within the same meeting, enabling focused collaboration during in-person brainstorming and small group discussions.

Availability: Breakout Rooms will be generally available in September 2021, while the new presentation modes, touch-up appearance capability, and auto-framing capability will be generally available by the end of the year.

Team messaging: New ‘Team Huddle’ enhances ad-hoc collaboration and augments corporate services with a live video room

With the new Team Huddle capability for RingCentral team messaging, team members can create ad-hoc collaboration experiences tied to their team channels enabling them to easily pop-in and out of meetings. Team Huddles replicate “drop-ins” for use cases such as virtual IT service desks, HR benefits Q&A rooms, all-day events, and more. It is available immediately to all RingCentral MVP and RingCentral Video Pro/Pro+ customers.

Phone: Introducing Mobile HeadsUp Display (HUD) to bring sophisticated desk phone capabilities on the go

RingCentral is the first-to-market mobile and desktop HUD functionality, making advanced phone capabilities, for users such as receptionists and admins, more mobile than ever before. Typically only available on proprietary desk phones or desktops, customer can now easily view colleagues’ real-time availability and manage multiple incoming calls with the capability to answer and transfer an incoming call, add users to a current call, chat with a colleague directly, or pick up a call on behalf of colleagues with permission – from a desktop or mobile device.

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