RingCentral September Release Brings Collaboration Closer to the Centre of Your Business Communications

Today’s workplace is filled with countless productivity tools that promise to save you time and energy. Yet, the more apps there are, the more frustrated workers seem to become. Just for communication alone, there are apps for phone calls, text, web meetings, video conferencing, team messaging, and more. In spite of that, there is often not one that combines all of the important tasks together.

As a result, more than two-thirds of workers say they waste up to 60 minutes at work navigating between apps. Many find this so frustrating that they would rather do household chores or pay bills. The good news is that up to 66 percent of workers see a single platform that integrates all of their communications as helping them to achieve a better workflow and be more productive.

Collaboration at the centre

We agree with unifying all our communications in a single platform and have been rethinking the app experience. This September release combines messaging, calling, and meetings all within the new RingCentral app.

By seamlessly combining all essential communications and collaboration functions in one tool, RingCentral offers you a single go-to app for a truly unified communications experience.

The RingCentral app helps save you time and boost productivity by making it easier to work with teams no matter where you are. With a collaborative workplace, you can:

• Message with teams and create them based on different topics, and add external guest participants, share files, notes, tasks, calendar events, and more.
• Quickly escalate from a chat to a call with just one click. Dial out and receive calls with enterprise voice capabilities globally.
• Schedule, start and join video or screen share meetings directly from the app.

Enhanced meetings experience

Another component of the unified app experience is integrated video meetings. This release comes packed with enhancements to take your meeting experience to the next level. You can now join any RingCentral meeting from a web browser, without having to download a client.

Additionally, we have made it easier for you to configure your meetings exactly the way you want them, both at the admin or user level. With access to over 50 default settings, you can apply options such as automatic muting, default video on/off, invite customisation, and more.

Your phone calls and online meetings will also now share a unified presence, ensuring you are not disturbed by incoming calls at the wrong time.

Furthermore, we are introducing the capability to use Android tablets as your RingCentral Rooms™ controller, giving you the choice between iOS and Android based on your preferred operating system. RingCentral Rooms users are now able to display images or a URL on conference room screens while meetings are not in progress to set a nice ambiance for the room. We’ve also added the capability for you to have an iPad outside of the conference room to display the schedule and availability of the room, thus making it easy to view the room’s schedule for the day or even make a reservation right then and there.

Increased availability and capabilities

Additionally, an integrated softphone allows you to communicate with teams globally no matter where they are with just a click of a button. Now you can further liberate your business from geographic borders and unify your entire global workforce under one secure communications platform. RingCentral Global Office™ allows you to activate international numbers instantly in up to 39 countries, now including Hungary and Croatia. We have also expanded our extended virtual presence offering, bringing our total number of supported countries to over 100. In addition, the last release we implemented Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese for RingCentral Office^®, this release we are further incorporating these languages into RingCentral Meetings™, bringing the total number of supported languages to 10.

Along with global call handling and local presence, the ability to track user changes to the phone system becomes more important as your company scales. With the addition of Audit Trail, you can easily troubleshoot issues within your online account on your own, without having to rely on help from support. Whether you’ve forgotten your login password or need to audit account changes, admins can now easily access the tools they need for account visibility.

This release offers some relatively major enhancements to user experience and overall productivity. As we continue to improve our product with four major releases every year, the RingCentral Office solution remains at the forefront of innovation. The benefits of this release are now available, so we invite you to see what’s new and continue to enjoy the best of the communications and collaboration experience available from RingCentral.