RingCentral Announces New Features for Hybrid Work

RingCentral has announced exciting new capabilities for RingCentral MVP” (Message Video Phone”). The new features are designed to immediately address the challenges faced by workers and teams working in a hybrid world.

Nat Natarajan, executive vice president, Products and Engineering at RingCentral, said, “As organizations embrace new hybrid work styles, RingCentral is focused on combating real-world organizational and end-user challenges by delivering capabilities that enable them to run and grow their business.

“We’re giving customers solutions that are designed to overcome the challenges they face today so they can maximize their potential every single day. From transcriptions and summaries to next-gen analytics and reporting, there’s a new innovation for all parts of the workforce – whether you’re in IT, a line of business role, or an end-user.”

Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion, said, “As we continue to navigate hybrid working environments and our meetings become more personable, the features RingCentral is announcing today are critical to keeping us connected. These new innovations are designed to ensure that the essence of physically being in the workplace and collaborating in-person is not lost.”

Meeting Summaries, Live Transcription and Whiteboard

• Live transcription: As the number of meetings continue to rise, it has now become the norm for people to be double-booked or join meetings late.

Leveraging AI, RingCentral now enables entire meeting conversations to be automatically transcribed, ensuring those who join late can easily catch up without disrupting the meeting, and to help those that are hearing impaired stay engaged with the conversation.

New transcription capabilities further support RingCentral’s focus on creating an accessible environment, democratizing the video experience for everyone.

• Meeting summaries: In order to meet the challenge of managing multiple conflicting meetings and fighting meeting fatigue, RingCentral is launching meeting summaries, giving users a recap of the conversation and an auto-generated short-form summary, video highlight reel, and keywords.

This comes in addition to the existing transcription and full recording for any recorded meeting, ensuring users can quickly find keywords for discussion points and get up to speed without needing to read or watch the entire recording.

• Whiteboard: As we continue to navigate a hybrid working environment, organizations are rapidly trying to arm their employees with the best tools and technologies so that people can replicate in-person experiences. RingCentral firmly believes that those working remotely should not be disadvantaged.

With this in mind, RingCentral is introducing its new infinite whiteboard feature whereby users can visually illustrate ideas through free form drawing, virtual sticky notes, uploading images, and annotating over content that can then be shared after meetings.

RingCentral is giving users infinite space on the whiteboard, enabling users to keep scrolling and adding drawings or images, without any constraints. A built-in mini map helps participants keep track of where they are on the whiteboard at all times when collaboration goes beyond the infinite borders.

Jim Lundy, founder and CEO, Aragon Research, said, “Running between meetings and being double-booked is a reality many of us are grappling with in today’s corporate world. Getting a downloadable recording transcription with a meeting summary and automated action items is a complete game changer and a huge competitive advantage for RingCentral.

“Talk about delivering on the promise of making unified communications work for you so you can be more productive and focus on things that actually matter and move your business forward.”

Availability: Live Transcription, Meeting Summaries and Whiteboard will be generally available to customers in Q1 2022.

Next-Gen Analytics Delivers Insights for Line of Business Use Cases

With next-gen analytics, users can now unlock insights that were previously impossible to assemble from on-premise and disparate solution approaches. Because RingCentral is born in the cloud, it includes powerful built-in analytics, available in a single pane of glass enabling customers to make business decisions in just a few clicks.

Additionally, line of business managers can now enhance their team’s performance and business impact with the power of analytics. The new line of business analytics gives users visibility into communications data on a rich customizable dashboard and reporting interface, as well as open APIs to help build key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to their business.

Users can now slice and dice data for ad hoc analysis and create custom reports to make effective, data-backed decisions by helping answer questions such as:

• Is every customer-facing team and facility optimally staffed? (For example: call volume & call handling trends)
• Is my team putting forward the best performance? Are there opportunities to train? (For example: number of calls, number of unanswered calls, call handling speed)
• How is my team’s communication activity driving sales and revenue outcomes? (For example: merge calls data with sales and revenue data)

Praneeth Vadrevu, senior data analyst, Lucas Group, said, “RingCentral’s new line of business analytics beta is a very robust tool that allows you to customize dashboards based on your business needs. The API configuration is a very useful automation for our organization which integrates into our data infrastructure.

“The reporting capabilities help us make better business decisions based on call volume and individual activity. I am so glad that these tools are made available to us now, whereas in the past it was a lot of manual retrieval of reports and ingesting them into Microsoft Excel.”

Dave Michels, Principal Analyst and Founder, TalkingPointz, said, “RingCentral expands its MVP offer with features that appear aimed at organizations with distributed teams. Analytics has long been critical for business success, regardless of department.

“With the new customizable dashboards and widgets from RingCentral, both IT teams and line of business users will have access to superior business intelligence at no additional cost, enabling organizations to run and grow their business.

“This offering means users can now access data they need at their fingertips to get the most out of their UCaaS solution, regardless of where their teams are based.”

Availability: Next-gen analytics is available immediately upon request and generally available in Q1 2022.

Content Sharing Via Phone Rear Camera

As teams continue to rely on video to stay connected, RingCentral has introduced further enhancements to help users get the most out of their video interactions.

RingCentral is one of the first Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) leaders to offer sharing in a meeting via phone rear camera within the RingCentral app, providing a new way for users to share live and real moments.

Availability: Content sharing via phone rear camera will be available in Q4 2021.

New RingCentral Rooms Capabilities

Hybrid work is now a reality with several people in the office and others working from home, a coffee shop, a train station, or elsewhere.

For those in the office, RingCentral is focused on minimizing the risk of being exposed to the virus by creating a no-touch environment with the latest advancements and features including the ability to seamlessly share content, switch from their devices to a meeting room, place phone calls in meeting rooms, and connect existing room systems to RingCentral’s video meetings.

Additionally, RingCentral believes it is equally important to create participant equity to ensure that people don’t feel left out. The company continues to make this a priority and show fast-paced innovation to support meeting rooms.

Roopam Jain, VP of Research, Connected Work at Frost & Sullivan, said, “We cannot let remote workers be at a disadvantage anymore. It is critical that organizations create a level playing field so remote participants are represented equally on screen, and meetings are more inclusive than ever before.

“The new RingCentral Rooms innovations are a big step in the right direction, helping to make hybrid work environments a success.”

RingCentral Rooms has already brought touchless experiences after less than two years in the market. These new enhancements will further support businesses as they consider their return to the office, bringing stronger than ever mobility and flexibility.

Tight integration across RingCentral’s MVP portfolio creates a leading offering, ensuring users can continue their conversations and work with minimal disruption.

New Features include:

• Mobile to room meeting switch – End users can easily switch an ongoing meeting on the go from mobile directly to a RingCentral Room
• Rooms as softphone – Existing RingCentral Rooms setups can now double as a phone, all from the same RingCentral Rooms application
• Rooms proximity sharing – Participants can share content directly to a nearby RingCentral Room without “joining” the meeting via Bluetooth
• Room Connector – With this add-on licence, users can now use existing SIP-enabled meeting room hardware to join RingCentral Video meetings in their meeting rooms.

RingCentral has also partnered with several hardware vendors, including Logitech, Poly and Yealink. Through these partnerships, RingCentral will offer new Rooms appliances that are easy to install, manage and use. The new appliances include:

• Logitech Rally Plus for RingCentral Rooms: Deploying RoomMate together with Rally Plus helps you easily add video collaboration capability to large rooms. With computing power and video conferencing software together in a dedicated appliance, RoomMate makes it easy to deploy RingCentral Rooms with the Logitech Rally Plus. This large room solution will be available this fall and rounds out the Logitech video collaboration portfolio for RingCentral Rooms providing meeting solutions for all size rooms.
• Poly Studio X70 video bar: The Poly Studio X70 video bar brings broadcast quality video to large rooms and is designed to upgrade the video collaboration experience by delivering meeting equality to all participants on the call. The Poly Studio X70 video bar rounds out Poly’s portfolio of video conferencing gear for rooms of all sizes, to include the Poly Studio X30, Poly Studio X50, and G7500
• Yealink A20 & A30: A new partnership with Yealink, launching both the A20 and A30 all-in-one meeting barswith the CTP18 tablet controller for small and medium-sized meeting rooms. With AI features such as auto framing and speaker tracking that allow users to experience a smarter and safer video conference, and Yealink noise-proof technology that brings excellent audio experience in small to medium rooms and ensures that everyone can be heard as well as seen, these features help deliver an excellent video collaboration experience.

Availability: New RingCentral Rooms appliances, Mobile to Room, Rooms as a softphone, Proximity sharing, and Room Connector will be generally available to customers in Q4 2021.