RingCentral just pushed out a major update to its main product, RingCentral Office, and it’s got some cool features – many of them pretty significant.
If you’re a RingCentral Office customer, these features are already in your online account. And as soon as you update your RingCentral Mobile App, you’ll find the new features there too.
Here’s a cheat sheet to latest/greatest RingCentral features. See something you like? Something intriguing? Something that says “Hello! I’ve been looking for you!”? Stay tuned – we’ll do some deep dives into specific features soon.
Paging
Those overhead speakers can be really annoying sometimes, but boy are they useful when you need to make an announcement to the whole company – or floor, or department, or just an area.
With the new Paging feature you can get overhead speakers, or designate specific desk phones as pagers, and tag specific people to do the paging. For convenience, they can select specific paging speakers, or make paging groups. “Somebody left their lights on in the parking lot!”
Shared Lines
Not easy to explain, but you’ve heard this feature in action: “Bob, pick up on Line 1.” Line 1, it turns out, is shared among multiple desk phones (which comprise something called a Shared Line Group). When a call comes in to Line 1, it rings on all of that group’s phones. Anybody in the group can pick it up.
Shared Lines are really handy for places like retail stores or warehouses, where you might have several phones and want incoming calls to be picked up by whoever is available. And if you pick up a call and find that it’s for Bob, you can put the caller on hold and then page (see above!) Bob to let him know.
Phone Rentals
With the RingCentral cloud phone system, you don’t have to invest in PBX hardware, saving big-time on up-front capital costs. But you may still need to buy IP phones, and that can add a shock to your first bill. So how about instead, we rent you the phones?
A few bucks a month for your contract period is easier on cash flow than a hundred bucks or more per desk. If you’ve got a lot of seats and need a lot of old phones replaced, this phone-rental deal can look mighty sweet.
Enterprise Search + Enterprise Bulk Buy
We don’t just have small-business customers at RingCentral; we also have customers with hundreds of users or more. When, as an admin, you are scrolling through long lists of users, phones, groups or extensions, it gets tedious. So how about a Search feature for those long lists? You got it!
We’ve added Bulk Buy features to the online system, too, to make adding multiple phones or extensions much easier. You can now upload a spreadsheet with all your user data, in one shot. (Your sales rep can send you the spreadsheet template.) You can also ship desk phones to multiple destinations in the same order – another time-saver.
Departments —> Groups
This is a tricky one, so pay attention. In RingCentral you can create collections of users dubbed Departments—which matches up well with the idea of having a Sales Department and an IT Department and an Accounting Department. But it turns out there are many other useful user collections that aren’t really departments.
So we’re changing the name of this “collection” concept to Groups. Where this pays off is when you create ad-hoc phone groups of users who are not actually in corporate departments as such—task groups, for example. It also lets us create groups of Shared Line extensions (because a Shared Line extension doesn’t belong to a particular user but is owned by its Shared Line group), or a Paging Group (which would consist of desk phones and overhead pagers). “Groups” is simply more extensible than “Departments”.
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A lot of stuff, as I said. Oh, and another favorite: New documentation, which you can find on the RingCentral homepage. It’s up to date and much more usable, with lots of screens and callouts and separate docs for different user types – admins, group managers, users and so on.
Find all this and more on the RingCentral Customer Support Center at https://success.ringcentral.com/.
Originally published Feb 11, 2014, updated Sep 12, 2024
