Circuit Sprint 136: from Labs to Live

It’s that time of year when we reflect on the past 12 months and celebrate our favorite moments. In keeping with the tradition, we thought we would do the same for Circuit, in this final blog post for 2019.

Over the year Circuit’s evolution and growth confirmed our commitment to making team collaboration more meaningful and more powerful. We set many benchmarks that benefited our customers and partners, from the number and quality of features released, to better provisioning and analytics, to our hallmark Workplace-as-a-service offer with Google. For the typical knowledge worker, this meant nearly an hour per week of time saved as we helped optimize their daily orchestration of work. We heard invaluable feedback from our users and are grateful for their suggestions, praise and the simple fact that they log in every workday to use something we pour our hearts into and they get work done.

So, to begin let’s first look at what’s new with our final sprint for the year, and then highlight the many enhancements we’ve brought to you in 2019.

From Labs to Live

For Sprint 136 we’ve focused on bringing many of the Circuit Lab features announced in Sprint 134 to the live environment this week. This includes the more powerful call stage and its enhancements including screen share and video snapshots, conversation and topic linking and the call quality indicator.

What’s new to Circuit Labs is the supporting call statistics when clicking on call quality indicator – great for troubleshooting, and for the geeks in all of us, showing a detailed view of what’s going on underneath the UI.

What a year it’s been ...

Collected under the key values we aspire to deliver with Circuit, here’s how Unify and the broader Atos family have made communication and collaboration more meaningful, productive and outcome-driven in 2019:

More immersive, meaningful and intuitive interactions

• Whiteboarding options for collaborative drawing during calls
• Zoom images for improved clarity
• Dual screen and video sharing for Circuit Meeting Room conferencing solution
• Enhanced hunt group telephony status
• Take pictures during screen sharing and video reduces navigating out of Circuit
• Read PDFs within Circuit so you don’t waste time downloading and reviewing out of Circuit
• Telephony connector interface improvements for more call control power and utility
• Automatic “in meeting” status keeps everyone informed about your availability
• Sidebar conversation details including pinning of topics facilitate understanding of conversation purpose and owners while improving access to important or reusable information
• Achieved WCAG 2.0 level AA making Circuit a more inclusive experience:
• Images scale with zooming tools
• All text meets the 4.5:1 contrast ratio
• Updated default avatars with enhanced contrast
• Full support for JAWS and NVDA screen
• Muted / disconnected notification
• New language support (Dutch, Portuguese)
• Content / topic linking brings multi-conversational utility and efficiency

More user control:

• Hot key support
• New conferencing call stage
• 14 new ringtones
• Unlimited snooze
• New flow for starting a conversation
• Large topic reply view
• Voicemail – greeting only / no message option
• Team call support improves incoming call answering success
• Anonymous participation option for policy fit with organizations requiring it
• Delete all phone history
• Delete participants from conversation (with / without history)
• Add users to ongoing 1:1 call
• Simplified audio / video settings
• Pop-out conversation panel
• Call summary of active conference including participant list
• Multiple conversation windows for faster navigation to priority topics
• Improved call summary interface for large conferences
• Conference join and leave tone control
• F11 screen size toggle

Better understanding of user and system behavior with:

• Basic domain stats
• Conversation filters
• Tenant data export for deeper analysis and reporting
• New call quality indicator and reporting metrics
• Domain statistics

More enterprise-grade administrative power, security, and control:

• External participant restrictions
• Minimum password policy support
• File sharing controls for tenant admins including disable all
• Define FAQ URL to align to company preferences
• WebRTC routing policy options
• Broadcast messages, so organizations can inform all users at once
• Telephony connector pools and sharing
• Telephony connector interface update
• Tenant admin role options
• Conversation data retention policy support

Bringing the ecosystem together:

• WPaaS = Google + Circuit + Atos
• Google Connector
• Office 365
• Plantronics status indicator integration
• Kuando busy light integrator integration
• JPL headset integration
• Apple Car Play support
• Incoming webhooks
• Bots for incoming webhooks
• Circuit Gmail add-on
• Enhanced OpenScape Business integration with enhanced Telephony features, mobility and CTI control of desk phones
• Enhanced OpenScape 4000 integration with additional softphone features, pickup and hunt group support Developer console
• Windows 10 notification integration
• Android call control widget

Improved go-to-market

• Expanded partner tenant management capabilities
• Enhanced options for partner support and debugging options with Circuit Live View
• Mass provisioning capabilities
• Subscriber telephony connector option
• Enhanced and expanded deployment APIs

All 2019 sprints on a single page are quite the sight to see, especially when you consider the effort and value that sits underneath each of these items. It’s truly remarkable and certainly meaningful to our user and partner communities. Congratulations to everyone on a successful 2019 and from everyone on the Circuit team, here’s to a prosperous 2020!