With one year having passed since Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) by RingCentral
became generally available, partners Avaya and RingCentral this week
announced a handful of general and Avaya-specific enhancements for the platform.
As an example of the latter, Michael Kuch, senior director of solutions marketing for Avaya, called out availability of a customizable key layout that should appeal to the company’s base of IP Office customers looking to transition from that on-premises system to the cloud platform. With this capability, companies using Avaya’s J100 Series phones can configure the ACO mobile or desktop app keypad to match up. The aim, he said, is to ease migration without forcing change to established business processes.
Consider a hospital that has hundreds, if not thousands, of people accustomed to using a certain process for paging. Not being able carry that process forward in a transition from an on-prem system to a cloud platform could be highly disruptive to the entire flow of the hospital, Kuch said. Having a customizable keypad would solve this issue.
Besides this customizable key layout, other new ACO features and functions include:
- Team Connect — Previously hidden within the menu, the new Teams Connect button is now visible on the video screen right next to a meeting’s calendar entry
- Salesforce Integration — Inbound and outbound calling, as well as call controls, are now available natively from within the Salesforce platform
- Color-coded Conversation Folders — With this feature, users can group and sort messages for faster retrieval and greater control over access to their conversations. Additionally, within messages users can use familiar text-formatting features to change type style and font and make bulleted lists, for example, Kuch said.
- Meeting Waiting Rooms — A conference host can now control who they admit into meetings, and when. During a meeting, a host can most side conversations into the waiting room, then bring participants back in once finished, Kuch said.
Looking ahead, Kuch said he expects ACO development to continue “in a few different buckets,” one of which is usability, another being continuous product improvement, and a third aimed at adding features to “reduce app fatigue.” Additionally, he added, work on Avaya-specific features will continue to help customers “stuck because of some feature or functionality that’s based on-premises” transition to the cloud.
