The new year is a time for resolutions. At RingCentral, we’ve got a few of our own. First, we’re absolutely, definitely (or possibly maybe) going to stop eating all the delicious homemade chocolate treats that our amazing coworkers always seem to bring into the office. More importantly, though, in 2019 we’re going to continue to enhance and simplify how you communicate, collaborate, and engage with your most important audiences. Toward that goal, our February release for RingCentral Office® delivers greater calling capabilities, deeper integrations, and expanded global services.
Calling: Improved accessibility, Call Delegation, Dynamic Conferencing, and more
In our latest release, we’ve improved accessibility support for RingCentral Office users with visual and motor impairments by providing enhanced color contrast, alternate text for images and links, zooming and scaling, and improved keyboard navigation. These improvements apply to both the RingCentral Phone™ app and the Admin Portal.
We’ve also made life easier for assistants who manage calls for multiple executives. Call Delegation provides all parties with a simplified dashboard of active calls. From their desktops, assistants can easily place, answer, or even join calls on behalf of executives.
In addition, enterprise customers requiring a larger dial plan now have the ability to increase extension lengths from six to eight digits. This means multi-site customers can also configure a wider range of site codes and short extensions. Administrators also now have the option to configure an outbound call prefix so users immediately know whether they’re dialing internal or external numbers.
Connect Platform: More powerful integrations for Salesforce and Alexa
The true power of the RingCentral Connect Platform™ comes from our open platform. With our deep and powerful integrations, you can continually broaden communication and collaboration across your organization. With this release, we’ve deepened our Salesforce® integration so you can spend less time switching between apps and more time closing deals. An all-new user interface and advanced call control features let you work the way you want. Never miss an important task again with offline call logging and a multi-call log option. In addition, you can now schedule a RingCentral meeting directly from within Salesforce.
We’ve also added a new integration for RingCentral Meetings™ for Alexa for Business, which makes it easy to start, join, and manage online meetings using any Alexa-enabled device.
Global Office®: Simplified ordering, enhanced auto-provisioning, and local dialing support
From February through April 2019, RingCentral will begin a phased rollout of a more streamlined process for ordering new Global Office and international virtual numbers. Admins will soon have the ability to receive and submit any documents required by a country through the RingCentral online portal. At this time, this capability can be used for new numbers only, not porting requests.
We’ve also enhanced our auto-provisioning support (via Active Directory and Google Workspace) for Global Office users in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, and Poland. Now admins for these countries can auto sync their directories down to the city level when making any moves, adds, or changes. End users will then receive an onboarding notification with their local RingCentral phone number. To automate provisioning between locations, accounts must have already purchased numbers for each city.
Finally, RingCentral has extended local dialing support to Global Office users in Australia, Mexico, and China. After setting a preferred local area code, users can then simply use seven- or eight-digit dialing to place local phone calls within their region, no area code or country code required.
And that completes our overview of the February feature release. If you want to learn more about these updates, please visit ReleaseCentral. As always, use the comments section below to share any ideas you have for new solution, support, or service improvements. We’d love to hear from you.
Originally published Feb 12, 2019, updated Dec 30, 2022
