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No Jitter Roll Year in Review: January to June 2022

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A collaboration technology graphic
Image: ElenaBs - Alamy Stock Photo
Given all the communications and collaboration news that happened this year, we thought it would be good to revisit the year that was by recapping some of the top announcements that we shared in our regular No Jitter Roll recaps.
 
Read below for a look back at the year that was and some of the industry news that you might have missed.
 
JANUARY 2022
  • 8x8 acquired Fuze, a cloud-based contact center and unified communications platform provider, as part of its play to provide experience-as-a-service (XCaaS) offerings to enterprise organizations.
  • Zoom began offering account owners and admins to enable the language interpretation feature by default when scheduling Zoom meetings, a feature meant to help create an equitable meeting experience for employees. The company also added Zoom Rooms' Smart Gallery support for Mac and Windows.
  • In a Microsoft Teams Room update, Microsoft added the option for admins to set the Front Row layout as the default for Microsoft Teams Rooms, and the user option to switch between multiple video cameras in Teams Rooms meetings.
  • Twilio announced a partnership with integrated business services company Teleperformance to provide enterprises with a combined customer engagement and business process optimization offering.
FEBRUARY 2022
  • Microsoft updated Teams, so Teams call participants who share a whiteboard within Teams on Surface Hub had feature parity with Microsoft's whiteboard application across PC, web, and mobile platforms.
  • Evolve IP and Cisco partnered on Evolve Anywhere with Webex, a unified communications service that combined Cisco’s Webex messaging and meeting capabilities with Evolve IP's enterprise calling service.
  • Ribbon, which specializes in providing real-time communications software, teamed up with Infosys to offer a managed service that allows clients to migrate from legacy on-premises PBX communications systems to Microsoft Teams Phone System Direct Routing in all geographic regions.
  • In Microsoft's monthly Teams update, meeting attendees could now pin their video to the meeting stage or hide their video from others' screens during a meeting, and iOS users could join a meeting through a single-tap feature, available on iOS devices and Microsoft Teams Rooms.
  • Zoom dipped its toes in the contact center pool with the release of Zoom Contact Center, a CCaaS offering that integrates an omnichannel contact center directly into the Zoom platform.
MARCH 2022
  • NICE announced that its NICE NTR-X service was available for compliance recording capture for communications done via Zoom Meetings and Zoom Phone.
  • Cisco announced an update to the Webex Meetings app for iPad users, which will add a picture-in-picture feature. With the update, users can now use the picture-in-picture feature to multitask, allowing them to attend a meeting while using other apps concurrently.
  • Microsoft partnered with BT, Rogers, Swisscom, Telia, and Verizon to unroll Operator Connect Mobile, which integrates users' mobile identities into Microsoft Teams. With Operator Connect Mobile, Teams users will be able to access their Teams voice services from any device. The company also announced that the preview for its cross-organization shared channels, Teams Connect. Four months later, in July, Teams Connect went into general availability.
  • Avaya, which offers communications and collaboration services, announced a strategic partnership with networking and cloud provider Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE). In the new team-up, Avaya will make its OneCloud CCaaS composable contact center services available to ALE customers. In return, ALE will make its ALE Digital Age Networking services to Avaya customers.
  • Digital customer experience (CX) service provider Sabio debuted a new connector service that allows customers to use Twilio Flex to customize their CX with conversational virtual agents powered by Google Cloud’s Dialogflow CX, Agent Assist, and contact center AI (CCAI) insights.
APRIL 2022
  • Customer engagement provider Verint announced that its compliance recording service is now available as a native Zoom integration. With the integration, enterprises can capture and analyze Zoom Phone and Zoom Meetings communications, which can include voice calls, video meetings, and screenshares.
  • Verizon added a zero-touch conference room access feature to BlueJeans Mobile, allowing employees to use their mobile devices to start and control meetings running on BlueJeans Rooms. It also announced updates to its home office video calling device BlueJeans Meetings app for Meta Portal.
  • Zoom integrated its live-events feature, Zoom Events, with its collaborative communications space known as Zoom Rooms. The key feature of the integration: users can start a live Zoom Event via their Zoom Room, either via their personal Zoom-certified hardware or Zoom Rooms Controller. The company also announced Zoom IQ for Sales, which records and analyzes customer interactions and then provides insight to better inform customer service decisions and launched a backstage feature for Zoom Events that allows panelists, speakers, and event staff to view live webinar feeds, chat with each other, answer attendees’ questions, and practice their presentations, all from behind the scenes. Zoom also announced cloud content management service integrations for Box and Microsoft's SharePoint. Available now, each integration allows Zoom users to create a Box or SharePoint folder, thus enabling them to upload and share files directly in Zoom Chats.
  • CCaaS provider Genesys and UCaaS/CCaaS provider 8x8 announced an integration between 8x8 Work and Genesys Cloud CX, which will allow contact center agents to collaborate with subject matter experts across the organization and vice versa.
MAY 2022
  • Webex Meetings became available for Chrome OS devices with the Webex Meetings Progressive Web App (PWA). With the app, Chrome OS device users can join a Webex meeting by clicking the Webex Meet icon in the launcher or join that meeting via URL or meeting number.
  • Customer experience management platform provider Sprinklr announced an integration between Twilio's voice and SMS technology and its Sprinklr Modern Care. The AI-based Sprinklr Modern Care analyzes conversations across over 30 digital channels to identify a customer's intent and sentiment and route them to the agents for issue resolution.
  • Google announced pending AI-based features for Google Workspace, including summaries to provide users with a digest of conversations that happened in Spaces and an automated meeting transcription. The features went into general availability in May 2022.
  • Zoom announced Collaborate Mode, in which the screen-share mode becomes more of an app-share mode, plus an integration with Miro's whiteboard app. For its part, Miro announced new integrations with other collaborative platforms: Miro App for Webex and Miro App for Google Meet. Both integrations will let users launch any Miro board directly within the meeting hosted by the collaborative platform and work in Miro with teammates without switching to the Miro app.
  • Pure IP has released Dynamics Call Connect, a service that’ll add voice communications to Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 customer service platform, allowing contact center agents to make inbound and outbound calls.
JUNE 2022
  • Cisco announced updates to Webex Calling, including AI-based background noise removal capabilities, site survivability, and multi call window for Webex Calling power users.
  • Microsoft announced Live Share — a capability added to the Teams software development kit (SDK) that lets Teams meeting participants use, edit and share tasks and workflow for non-Microsoft applications within the Teams environment. The announcement brought feature parity to something both Slack and Zoom had already unveiled.
  • Zoom and contact center service provider Genesys expanded the terms of their partnership, where Genesys said it would enable its global direct and indirect channels to deliver a combined Zoom Phone plus Genesys Cloud CX solution.
  • Zoom also teamed up with interoperability provider Mio on an integration that'll allow Zoom Chat users to directly message users on Microsoft, Teams, Slack, and Webex by Cisco without opening a separate app.
  • Finally, Zoom announced Zoom One, a bundled offering that combines its chat, phone, meeting, whiteboard, and webinar capabilities. Zoom One serves as a substitute for buying individual licenses for each service, simplifying billing for IT management.
  • Slack updated its asynchronous communications tool, Slack Huddles. These updates include a coworking space in huddles, saved as a message thread in the channel or DM where the huddle was launched, video-enabled huddles, and multi-person screen shares.
In the second No Jitter Roll recap, we will round-up the communications and collaboration announcements from the second half of the year. Stay tuned for that!