8x8 makes raft of updates to platform

8x8 is making enhancements to its communications platform with new, global cloud communications and collaboration features

"A modern, seamless platform matters. Owning the fully integrated cloud technology stack, from voice, team chat and meetings to contact centre, enterprise APIs and programmable applications, enables us to rapidly inject new, innovative capabilities across the 8x8 Open Communications Platform via our microservices architecture," says 8x8 chief product officer Dejan Deklich.

"This benefits organisations significantly as it removes friction for both administrators and users, allowing them to easily mix-and-match, manage and use the communications, collaboration and customer engagement features they need in a fast-evolving, operate-from-anywhere business environment.

The company has made updates to the platform's user interface.

It has also made updates to 8x8 Work, the integrated app for voice, team chat and video meetings, including:

• Automatic presence status sync with Google and Microsoft Office 365 Calendars sets user presence based on calendar events, removing the manual steps to prevent interruptions while on calls or video meetings.
• Dark mode, the ability to mute chat and SMS notifications, and block spam calls and numbers.
• Amazon Fire OS support and available in the Amazon app store.

8x8 Meet is included in the 8x8 Work app or available as a standalone meetings solution, and now includes:

• Enhanced security with end-to-end (E2E) encryption for 8x8 Work app users and guests joining via a web browser.
• Improved collaboration for large groups with support for up to 100 active participants per meeting.
• Optimisation of upstream and downstream video quality to adjust for bandwidth consumption or network quality.
• In-meeting YouTube Video sharing with automatic audio source prioritization for participants.

Expanded global presence

8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams is generally available for users based in 42 countries and delivers an enterprise-class global telephony direct routing solution for businesses and organisations while keeping the Microsoft Teams experience unchanged for end users.

8x8 now provides full PSTN replacement in 42 countries across six continents allowing multinational organisations to consolidate their communications infrastructure globally.

Administration updates 

Resource-constrained IT teams can manage the communications requirements of a geographically dispersed mobile and remote workforce.

New capabilities include:

• Role-based access controls provide predefined roles, the ability to specify site administrators and granular controls for billing and ordering administrators.
• Compliance is now available with emergency services regulatory requirements as the 8x8 Admin Console now allows administrators to send automatic emergency notifications, determine target recipients and customise the notification content.
• Integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enables User Single Sign-On (SSO) configuration, allowing users to authenticate into any 8x8 application using their Azure AD credentials.
• The ability to customise an organisations' video meeting branding by adding a custom background, logo and vanity meeting URLs.

Insights

New highly scalable analytics platform enables analysis of user adoption, system performance, data sharing and organisation-wide call and meeting metrics. New features include:

• Meeting analytics for tracking product usage and user adoption and to identify and manage audio and video quality issues.
• The Ring Groups Summary report benefits from 8x8's analytics platform, which provides administrators with faster reporting, more flexible metric comparisons and the ability to filter and access call detail records. For example, if a ring group shows several abandoned calls, admins can simply sort and find the call detail records of abandoned calls and with one-click access call summary information as well as the details such as the call logs, etc.
• The addition of scheduling and API options to propagate and share reports to aid decision making.
• Navigation and display options have been improved, with new dynamic filtering options that enable users to prioritise the data fields that are most relevant to their business needs.