If you aren’t already familiar with RingCentral Meetings, it’s our popular and powerful conferencing solution that comes with every tier of our flagship offering. Every RingCentral Office end-user is empowered with their own audio conferencing bridge and web meeting capabilities by using RingCentral Meetings. It makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues, project teams, clients and partners from any location through high definition face-to-face online meetings. It allows you to share your screen, websites, or documents using any computer (PC or Mac), tablet (iPad or Android) or smartphone (iPhone or Android).
For organizations that have moved wholeheartedly into the new anywhere, anytime workplace, RingCentral Meetings has been a boon to their productivity, creativity and global reach, all while reducing costs related to travel and the acquisition of stand-alone video and web conferencing services.
The next generation of cloud-based room video conferencing
Now, RingCentral is introducing a next generation cloud-based room video conferencing solution that extends RingCentral Meetings’ capabilities to enterprise conference room setups with HD video, audio and web conferencing.
In a nutshell, RingCentral Rooms is a dedicated, software-based room video conferencing solution that works with off-the-shelf hardware (versus expensive proprietary hardware), and supports up to two monitors or TV screens so participants can see the materials being presented as well as the active speaker and gallery views to experience the feeling of truly being in a meeting together.
RingCentral Rooms was developed to be an affordable, easy-to-use alternative to more costly and cumbersome H.323/SIP-based video conference room systems that require the use of expensive legacy hardware and often the involvement of IT staff to properly configure the systems. RingCentral Rooms is a perfect solution for any size room, from huddle rooms to conference rooms with multiple monitors.
It’s incredibly easy to use, requiring only an iPad to schedule and initiate meetings and featuring touch controls that allow the meeting host to share content, control the camera, mute and unmute the microphone, start and stop video, and invite attendees via email (even in real time during the ongoing meeting). RingCentral Rooms also features seamless calendar integration for scheduling and a very simple click to join feature.
RingCentral Rooms works with your choice of off-the-shelf hardware and it’s so intuitive, IT involvement is not required. RingCentral, in fact, does not sell hardware for RingCentral Rooms. Its system requirements are such that you can simply and affordably purchase any off-the-shelf cameras, speakers, microphone and monitors, as well as an iPad and Mac machine (even a Mac Mini), if you don’t already have most or all of these at your site.
For organizations that have already invested in H.323/SIP conference room systems, RingCentral has developed RingCentral Room Connector, enabling them to connect and collaborate with RingCentral Meetings participants who are joining the conference from their mobile devices, desktop machines and telephones, or other RingCentral Rooms. RingCentral Room Connector is a cloud-based gateway that requires no additional software or hardware to work. Joining a meeting couldn’t be easier. Just dial in the meeting IP address and you’re there.
Both RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Room Connector work with a wide range of legacy video conference systems including those from Polycom, Cisco, Lifesize, and others.
RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Room Connector do require modest add-on licenses to your existing RingCentral account, which you can easily add and activate at our online account management site. You can also view and configure all RingCentral Rooms from our online account management site using the Meetings tool.
In today’s global business environment with customers, partners, and colleagues located in multiple locations – it’s essential to have reliable, easy-to-use, high quality video conferencing solutions that allow you work the way you want, on any device you choose. RingCentral is committed to providing these solutions to you and continuously making it better and easier to get work done and communicate more effectively than ever.
To learn more about RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Room Connector, click here.
Originally published Jun 09, 2016, updated Jan 30, 2023