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already announced from RingCentral, Microsoft, Avaya and 8×8, and the new use cases they create.
● RingCentral recently released new integrated solutions in the areas of contact center and online meetings, with a new version of the company’s user interface to follow soon. RingCentral’s new “collaborative” Contact Center adds the company’s Glip team messaging application (acquired in 2015) to the RingCentral Contact Center service (built on inContact technology). The idea here is to facilitate communication among contact center agents and knowledge experts across an enterprise in order to resolve customer issues quickly. Agents
have access to the full range of Glip features, including team chat, video chat, file sharing and storage, calendar sync and task management. RingCentral Meetings is a new stand-alone web and video meetings solution that combines web meetings (based on technology from Zoom) and team collaboration (based on RingCentral’s Glip) into an easily accessed, subscription-based service. Meeting participants will be able to seamlessly transition from a Glip chat conversation to an online meeting to share screens and discuss projects live. Participants can share files from services like Dropbox, share animated online GIF files and save all messages and content on Glip.
● Microsoft has been integrating with team collaboration, but in a different approach that
incorporates Calling, Meeting and Messaging features from Skype for Business Online in
Office 365 into the Microsoft Teams chat-based workspace that centralizes a project’s related conversations, interactions and documentation (Teams is included free with an Office 365 Business or Enterprise subscription). Microsoft is currently in the process of evolving Teams as the primary user interface for Office 365 and has been adding in the Skype for Business Online features (telephony, conferencing and chat), with waves of feature parity already occurring and continuing throughout 2018. The integration creates new possibilities for teamwork. For example, users
will be able to pull up relevant documents and information about participants prior to a meeting,
Telecom Reseller 5 then capture and transcribe remarks during a
meeting, and automatically add the transcript and a cloud-based recording to the relevant team channels for future review.
● Avaya’s Equinox Experience with team collaboration integration is due out this May. Avaya is enhancing the Avaya Equinox UC app to include the features and functionality of its cloud- based team collaboration capability called Spaces (based on technology from Avaya’s subsidiary Zang). All Equinox client users will get Basic team collaboration functionality which includes team space creation and management, web and mobile app access, room chat, one-to-one instant messaging and video calling, file sharing (1 GB), and voice conferencing for up to five participants with content sharing. Plus and Business editions (the paid plans) increase the number of audio and video conferencing participants, add unlimited file sharing and offer expanded support options. (Avaya introduced the Equinox desktop and mobile client in 2017 to replace multiple earlier Avaya client offers – Communicator, Flare, OneX and Scopia clients).
● 8×8 hints that one of the new features of its forthcoming X Series will be a new internally- developed team messaging solution integrated into its unified desktop and mobile experience. The new X Series, due out in the U.S., U.K. and France this summer, combines all 8×8 services as a single platform, bringing together 8×8’s separate Virtual Office, Virtual Contact Center and ContactNow cloud-based products as a continuum of services. Eight mix and match feature packages, X1-X8,
are designed to line up with various user types/ roles within an organization. Team messaging will be included across all X Series packages. The advanced X Series packages will also include 8×8’s Sameroom interoperability platform that connects disparate team messaging solutions.
Stay tuned as other providers will follow soon, developing new integrations between team collaboration tools and their business communications applications and services – and new possibilities for teamwork. ■
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