No Jitter Roll: Slack & Salesforce Bundle Up; RingCentral Adds E2EE

Welcome to the No Jitter Roll, the regular round-up of news dedicated to the communications and collaboration industry. In this week's edition: a look at a Slack and Salesforce combined offering, news about an encryption and security service for Salesforce, an end-to-end encryption offering for RingCentral MVP, and monitoring service for Microsoft Teams voice options.

 

This week, Slack shared details on a new technology bundle, the Sales Productivity Bundle, and teed up a combined Sales Cloud and Slack offering powered by Salesforce Customer 360. The Sales Productivity Bundle will include Salesforce's Sales Cloud Unlimited Edition and Slack's Enterprise Grid plan at a discounted rate.

 

Additionally, the upcoming Sales Cloud and Slack product will see the two services integrated, allowing real-time CRM data from Sales Cloud to be fed directly into Slack channels. Account teams can then monitor opportunities and customer details as they are available in real-time. Additionally, users can send updates from Sales Cloud to the Slack channel, and sales representatives can update the CRM using built-in slash commands within Slack.

 

The combined offering also comes with several out-of-the-box templates for teams to get started, allowing for structured yet customized workflows. For instance, with an onboarding template, enterprises can build a workflow that triggers when a new hire is added to Slack and adds them to the channels that they need access to or be alerted on specific tasks like filling out HR forms or reading onboarding material.

 

Cloud communications provider Vonage, now part of Ericsson, launched Salesforce Shield for Vonage Contact Center (VCC) and Vonage for Service Cloud Voice (SCV), which provide additional security features for Vonage customers that have a contact center integration with Salesforce. Salesforce Shield features AES 256-bit encryption for data protection, and it allows enterprises to bring their existing encryption keys along with the ability to manage them.

 

"As more organizations embrace a work-from-anywhere business model, today's contact center has become more decentralized. Vonage Contact Center with Salesforce Shield enables a cloud-based contact center that empowers agents to work remotely, with access to everything they need to meet customers' needs while maintaining the integrity of their data," said Sheila McGee-Smith of McGee-Smith Analytics in the company press release.

 

Cloud communications provider RingCentral shared that it is offering end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to its video service. With this new capability, users can turn E2EE in the middle of a call or meeting and use the feature across RingCentral's desktop, mobile, or web version of RingCentral MVP. Additionally, IT admins can toggle E2EE on and off and export messaging data. E2EE for phone and message will be available in a closed beta globally for select customers at the end of this year.

 

Digital collaboration and UC analytics company Vyopta announced that it now fully supports Microsoft Teams voice services, including Microsoft Phone Plans, Direct Routing, and Operator Connect. With Vyopta's existing Collaboration Performance Management platform, users can now track the performance of the voice communications infrastructure in Teams, which can include on-prem and cloud video interop platforms, session border controllers (SBCs), and trunks from a network and a PSTN provider. Additionally, Vyopta customers can use the Collaboration Performance Management platform to explore tech adoption and usage metrics and access all video call logs from a single portal.

 

In case you missed it this week on No Jitter, leading-industry analysts Dave Michels and Zeus Kerravala are back with another installment of their No Jitter Shorts series. This week, they share their impressions of this year’s AWS re:Invent event. Watch below for their take.