Cloud integrations and why they matter
Cloud is today’s urgent business imperative. It is an exciting and important journey for any enterprise to unlock its full potential and continue to stay competitive. Cloud is undoubtedly a critical enabler; it is the engine for driving better, faster, and cheaper citizen and customer services. It is also – in combination with other enablers such as automation, AI, and edge computing – the means for organizations to remain sufficiently optimized and agile as technologies evolve.
The need for cloud integrations came from the requirement for our applications to work together and maximizing the full value of the investment. You may use integrations without even knowing, many workplaces use cloud integrations for everyday tasks, for example in Google or Salesforce. The goal is to enhance collaboration between knowledge workers and the value comes from being able to share data, analytics, and tools between multiple workers, teams, functions, even those separated by distance.
What are cloud integrations and APIs?
At a high-level definition, cloud integrations bring multiple cloud environments together, either in a hybrid deployment or as multiple public clouds, so they can operate as a single cohesive IT ecosystem. A cloud API is a programming interface that enables the development of applications and serves as a gateway that provides direct and indirect cloud services to users.
Why should we use cloud integrations?
Today’s workplace can be chaotic and have app overload, especially due to the pandemic where more employees are work from home or work from anywhere. Meetings which would have taken place face to face now take place online, which for some people mean one app for one customer and a different one for another. The average employee uses 8 apps and this number increases as the size of the company grows.
With so many apps being used daily, what are the effects of this? More than two-thirds of workers say they waste up to 60 minutes at work navigating between apps which totals 32 days a year of lost productivity. This is one reason why cloud integrations can be of benefit as with apps working together, not against each other, employee time can be spent more productively.
Time is money, and with navigation of apps wasting time this will correlate with a loss in earnings. Another benefit of cloud integrations is that there are so many integrations to choose from, for example, CRM integrations can help your sales teams. Using integrations sales teams can respond to leads faster using features like ‘one click to dial’ and will be able to measure performance easier using dashboards. You can also integrate your CRM with your contact center solution for an all-round better customer experience.
The benefits of cloud integrations don’t just stop with the employees, there are overall operational benefits for the business that implement them. The scalability and reduction of operational costs can mean a faster time to market for products and services. The flexibility can allow for internal processes to be reviewed and improved, meaning further advantages down the line.
Does Unify Office by RingCentral offer a public app gallery with integrations prebuilt for the platform?
Unify Office (UO) is built on an open Application Programming Interface (API) architecture and provides several out-of-the-box integrations. Unify Office (UO) offers 150+ pre-built integrations including Microsoft Office 365, Teams, Outlook, Google, Salesforce, and DropBox to name a few.
General integrations may also be developed depending on the needs of the client using our library of APIs in relevant Software Development Kits or SDKs.
Our ATOS Unify development teams have shown in the recent Unify Office Hackathon their capabilities of building very innovative business integrations and innovative use cases boosting team productivity using Unify Office API interfaces. One hack demonstrated a very smooth integration of cloud communications and messaging from Unify Office into a remote patient monitoring solution for our HealthCare industry. Another hack enabled earthquake emergency notifications for employees on our Unify CP devices using the Unify Office API interfaces. Very exciting ideas from our development teams to drive innovations, optimize workflows, and save costs for our Unify Office customers.
Describe Unify Office’s integration with Office 365 and Teams.
UO provides seamless integration with Office 365. This is provided via a Chrome browser plugin. Once installed and authorized against your O365 account, your contacts and calendars can be integrated, and the plugin will also allow the user to click to call on numbers within the page view. Unify Office for Microsoft Office 365 seamlessly integrates business communications into your cloud work environment, transforming Microsoft Office 365 into an enterprise-grade communications hub with a powerful and easy-to-use interface that is very simple for end-users to deploy and IT to manage. Unify Office for Office 365 integration is available for Mail, Calendar, Contacts (People) and Tasks. Further we also have a full integration into Microsoft Teams and offer a Teams Direct Routing option as well. These options complete the Teams messaging and video features by adding a cloud phone embedded right into the Teams app experience.
For the full list, please see our app gallery here: ringcentral.com/apps/unify-office/
Does Unify Office developer programmes offer tutorial and SDKs to assist with developing custom integrations?
Unify Office (UO) offers SDKs that wrap its APIs in various languages, including JavaScript, Java, and C#. These APIs cover all the functionality offered by UO. All UO integrations, homegrown or partner-initiated, are built using these APIs. Refer to https://www.ringcentral.com/apps/#/apps for our growing list of integrations. These are all available to our customers Day 1.
How many developers use your platform?
Unify Office has over 150 apps developed for it’s brand, access to 5000 custom apps developed on the RingCentral platform by over 50,000+ developers.
Provider some examples of customers who leveraged these integrations.
Recently, RingCentral signed up Waitrose and partners as a customer and the need to integrate into their very niche Zebra devices was a deciding factor on going with a solution based on RingCentral’s open platform. Read the case study here.
Salesforce integrations are our most popular request. Have a read of some RingCentral customers case studies here:
Microsoft integrations are our next most popular request. Have a read of some RingCentral customers case studies here:
Find more about Unify Office by RingCentral here:
