Spring can mean many things to many people. For some, it’s a time to plant flowers. For others, it’s a time to set their clocks ahead by an hour (except in Arizona, which strikes us as both odd and cool at the same time). And yet others see it as a time of obsessing over cleaning, for reasons we can’t understand.
For RingCentral, however, spring is a time of renewed and refreshed cloud communications and collaboration. So just in time for spring, our latest RingCentral Office® release includes a bevy of new features designed to help your organization work as one to better serve your customers.
Global updates: Puerto Rico calls; more languages for voicemail to text; new Israeli numbers
With our new release, any calls your company makes to and from Puerto Rico are now treated as a call to and from the United States, meaning wherever your employees are in the world, they can call Puerto Rico at the same great rates as calling the US. If you’re inside the US, calls to Puerto Rico are now included in your unlimited US calling minutes.
In addition, voicemail-to-text is now available in Canadian French and Australian English. You can preview your voicemail messages from any device in either of these languages when you’re on the go or just can’t get to the phone. You can also access visual voicemail through your online account on RingCentral for Desktop or via the RingCentral mobile app.
Finally, we now have new Global Office phone numbers available for those looking to expand in Israel. With Global Office you get a local PBX service with local phone numbers, 1,000 pooled regional calling minutes, and one easy portal for managing your reliable cloud phone system across your multi-site organization.
Calling: Enhanced survivability; configurable call queues; and a new service status site
Our latest release includes RingCentral Persist, which allows you to maintain your critical communications services—including emergency calling, extension-to-extension dialing, inbound and outbound calling, and call-back capabilities—in the case of an internet failure. Persist is easy for your IT team to deploy, with no service interruption for end users.
With configurable call queues, your admins now have more flexibility. By assigning a name to each direct number that’s added to a call queue, agents now have more context on incoming calls. And you can now customize how call information is displayed across desk phones and softphones by choosing whether to display phone number name, caller ID name, or queue name.
Finally, visit our new trust site for real-time updates on the status of your RingCentral service. Simple to access and navigate, you can view the status of your core services by feature and region, allowing you to quickly determine what needs immediate attention.
The RingCentral App: @team mentions and code snippets
With our new @team mention feature, you can now address everyone on your team quickly and easily. By using @team, each person in the group is notified as if they were individually @mentioned, saving you time and energy, especially when making important announcements to a large group. Team admins can enable this feature in the team chat settings.
In addition, we’ve added code snippets to the app, which allows you to conveniently share snippets of code in its original formatting. You can view and easily reuse the code by copying or downloading.
Connect Platform: More Microsoft integrations; quickly embed voice and text; new APIs
We’ve launched a highly intuitive new user interface for RingCentral for Microsoft 365 that allows you to manually set presence. You can also schedule video meetings and conference calls from your Microsoft 365 calendar natively. And we’ve given you the ability to launch group or multi-party calls. Finally, you can also quick call/SMS from Microsoft 365 Contact Cards.
We’re also excited to bring you RingCentral Embeddable, which makes it easy to embed RingCentral voice and text into any web application in just 15 minutes—no code required. You can quickly embed a full-featured softphone into your favorite web application for an integrated communications experience that’s easy to use and improves productivity, without the usual lengthy development time.
Finally, with our Retention Management API, you can manage your data volume programmatically. Your account administrator can now dynamically set your data retention policy to help optimize your data usage and ensure data retention compliance guidelines are met.
That’ll do it for our new release. We can’t wait to tell you about all the cool new stuff we have cooking for our next release. In the meantime, enjoy your spring cleaning.
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 May 22, 2019, updated Dec 30, 2022
