8×8 Raises the Bar on Cloud Communications; New Release Delivers Work From Anywhere Insights and Improved Administrator and User Experience

“A modern, seamless platform matters. Owning the fully integrated cloud technology stack, from voice, team chat and meetings to contact center, enterprise APIs and programmable applications, enables us to rapidly inject new, innovative capabilities across the 8×8 Open Communications Platform via our microservices architecture,” said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc. “This benefits organizations significantly as it removes friction for both administrators and users, allowing them to easily mix-and-match, manage and use the communications, collaboration and customer engagement features they need in a fast-evolving, operate-from-anywhere business environment.”

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The latest 8×8 Open Communications Platform updates empower organizations of all sizes and levels with new, global cloud communications and collaboration features that provide:

Frictionless User Experience: improved, intuitive user experience facilitates employee adoption of mobile-first capabilities and increases engagement and productivity while reducing overall IT support and training costs.

8×8 Work, a single, integrated app for voice, team chat and video meetings now features:

• Automatic presence status sync with Google and Microsoft Office 365 Calendars sets user presence based on calendar events, eliminating manual steps to prevent interruptions while on calls or video meetings.
• Dark mode, the ability to mute chat and SMS notifications, and block spam calls and numbers, keeps users focused and productive while working from anywhere.
• Amazon Fire OS support and available in the Amazon app store. Users of select Amazon Fire Tablet models can now enjoy the same best-in-class end-user experience and features available on iOS and Android devices, including seamlessly moving from a chat or SMS to a voice call or video meeting at the tap of the finger.

8×8 Meet is included in the 8×8 Work app or available as a standalone meetings solution, and now includes:

• Enhanced security with end-to-end (E2E) encryption for 8×8 Work app users and guests joining via a web browser.
• Improved collaboration for large groups with support for up to 100 active participants per meeting.
• Optimization of upstream and downstream video quality to adjust for bandwidth consumption or network quality.
• In-meeting YouTube video sharing with automatic audio source prioritization for participants.

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Expanded Global Presence

• 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams is generally available for users based in 42 countries and successfully delivers an enterprise-class, easy-to-administer global telephony direct routing solution for businesses and organizations while keeping the Microsoft Teams experience unchanged for end users.
• 8×8 X Series is now available for organizations headquartered in the Republic of Ireland, providing full PSTN replacement, localized service plans with domestic and international calling, local direct inward dial (DID) and toll-free numbers and support for billing in Euros. Full service plan details for the Republic of Ireland are available at X Series Ireland.
• Full PSTN replacement providing access to services such as emergency, local and toll free numbers and short code calling were added for South Africa, Greece, Kazakhstan and Peru. This advanced level of support provides faster, simpler implementations for multinational organizations as well as simplified ongoing administration. With the addition of these four countries, 8×8 now provides full PSTN replacement in 42 countries across six continents allowing multinational organizations to consolidate their communications infrastructure globally.

Effortless Administration: resource-constrained IT teams can quickly and easily manage the full communications requirements of a geographically dispersed mobile and remote workforce. New capabilities include:

• New Role-based access controls provide predefined roles, the ability to specify site administrators and granular controls for billing and ordering administrators.
• Easy compliance is now available with emergency services regulatory requirements. The 8×8 Admin Console now allows administrators to send automatic emergency notifications, determine target recipients and customize the notification content.
• Integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enables User Single Sign-On (SSO) configuration, allowing users to authenticate into any 8×8 application using their Azure AD credentials.
• The ability to customize an organizations’ video meeting branding by adding a custom background, logo and vanity meeting URLs.

Deeper Insights: new highly scalable analytics platform enables fast, easy analysis of user adoption, system performance, data sharing and organization-wide call and meeting metrics. New features include:

• Detailed meetings analytics enable admins to track product usage and user adoption and to identify and manage audio and video quality issues.
• The enhanced Ring Groups Summary report benefits from 8×8’s latest generation analytics platform, which provides administrators faster, easier reporting, more flexible metric comparisons and the ability to rapidly filter and access call detail records. For example, if a ring group shows several abandoned calls, admins can simply sort and find the call detail records of abandoned calls and with one click access call summary information as well as the details such as the call legs, etc.
• The addition of scheduling and API options make it easier than ever to propagate and share reports to aid faster decision making.
• Navigation and display options have also been improved, with new dynamic filtering options that enable users to prioritize and focus upon the data fields that are most relevant to their business needs.

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