Getting you hooked with Circuit and Webhooks

Circuit Sprint 120

Getting you hooked with Circuit and Webhooks

Welcome to Sprint 120! With our most current update, we are releasing a few Circuit Labs capabilities, namely multiple conversation windows, our enhanced Google connector, and the new participant information pane. Thank you for all your feedback that helped us polish those particular features before we make them available to all users. You can find an overview of these features in my previous Sprint 116 post.

We have also invested a lot in integrations and evolving our meeting experience:

Most of the times, our focus is on end users, but we are also working to make life easier for your trusted tenant admins. With our current release, Circuit admins will be able to:

• Broadcast to tenant users: Circuit admins now have the capability to send broadcast messages to all their tenant users. These broadcast messages will appear at the top of the Circuit application screen (where you occasionally see connection quality notifications).

Pool share Telephony Connector: Domain administrators can now share a pool of telephony connectors with other domains for cost optimization and to scale support for small and medium customers.

But this is not all–we are releasing more new features and capabilities to Circuit Labs!

• Telephony Connector user interface and new phone calls view: Circuit users can now access their phone call log directly from the “global functions” bar on the left hand side. From this view, you can filter call logs and access your voice mails.
• OpenScape Business (V2R7) integration: This combines enterprise telephony and team collaboration through a secure connector with enhanced call control capabilities like moving call between devices and conferencing. You can read more about our OpenScape Business story on my previous post.
• Outlook calendar “in meeting” status synchronisation: With our Outlook plugin, you can integrate Circuit with your calendar to set up meetings. With his update, we go a step further and display the Circuit status message as "in meeting" for users that are in a meeting based on their calendar.
• Read PDF files in Circuit conversations: Up until now to read a PDF document you had to download it to your desktop and open it offline. With this feature enables in Labs, you can now view PDF files directly in conversations.

We are also evolving our meeting experience to make it easier for all participants:

• Simplified audio and video settings: We have worked to simplify the selection of microphone and speaker into a single selection for combined audio devices such as a headset or a conference speaker phone. Note: It is still possible to select different speaker and microphone via the ‘more options’ button.
• Add user to an ongoing Circuit session: This is a particularly much anticipated feature which allows participants (Circuit or phone users) to be added to an ongoing 1:1 call without creating a separate group conversation. This is ideal for one off calls, e.g. when you quickly need to consult with an expert on a particular issue or question with no ongoing collaboration relationship.
• Enhanced session summary view for large participants lists: For each conference call, Circuit provides metadata such as number of participants, call duration, etc. For large sessions with dozens of participants, that list can get quite exhaustive. It‘s now possible to list only the first 20 session participants. To access the remainder names just click to expand the list.

And there‘s one more new thing that I‘m particularly excited about, because it underlines our commitment to our developer community and integration with business workflow. As you know, we are already supporting Zapier to enable workflow integrations with 1500 different SaaS applications. While this is easy to implement and great for end users, we also want to enable more custom integrations with no third-party cloud service involved.

That‘s why we now support incoming Webhooks. Phase 1 of supporting Webhooks within Circuit will enable developers to post textual messages from external applications into a Circuit Conversation. As an example, a developer could program a simple text field on their website that allows customers to enter a contact phone number to be called back on. This text field would automatically be posted to an inside sales team Circuit Conversation to be actioned, i.e. followed-up on with the prospect or customer. We see many more integration use cases for corporate functions like customer support or marketing, as well as vertical use cases in manufacturing, services, logistics or any other market.

As always, thank you for using Circuit and feel free to reach out to me on Circuit and let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

PS Please don‘t forget to update your iOS app: Circuit is now available on Apple CarPlay.