RingCentral is a well known and established UCaaS ( and CCaaS – Contact Center as a Service) solution that receives very high marks and appreciation in the last couple of years, being a usual winner of the Gartner Magic Quandrant recognition.
RingCentral's UCaaS solution's strong execution capabilities, comprehensive feature set, consistent product innovation, strong financials have all contributed to its recognition in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Furthermore, RingCentral's acquisition of Glip, a team collaboration and project management platform, has strengthened its position in the market by providing additional features that help users communicate, collaborate, and manage tasks more effectively.
I my experience, there are couple of features that missing when you compare the solution to a legacy on-premise solution (the likes of Cisco Call Manager and Avaya). When doing the transition to RingCentral UCaaS cloud based solution you should be plan for additional bolt-on integration to complement the technical solution in order to match your previous IP PBX functionalities.
1. Limited audit trail capabilities for your administrators.
While the system has capability to log who did what change on the system configuration, the audit trail does not cover all the changes performed by an administrator and the level of detail is far from being satisfactory for a quick problem/incident resolution. Moreover, there is no reporting or custom query availability to the system, you will spend a lot of time parsing the audit log in case of an audit.
While there is a possibility to manually export the audit trail log in csv format, there is no built-in possibility to automate the logs sending for a centralised SIEM.
2. Limited call log details for your administrators
The calls going through the system are traceable. But the level of detail required for troubleshooting is highly inappropriate (you will only see caller callee number, time Caller iD information and that’s about it. If a call is dropping before RTP stream is established, you will not see it in the logs. No possibility to see a SIP trace or registration process for diagnostic purposes.
While there is a possibility to manually export the audit trail log in csv format, there is no built-in possibility to automate the logs sending for a centralised Syslog. As such, there is no preventative alerting available on certain types of errors or denial of service attacks you otherwise be able to see in the logs.
3. No dynamic E911 capabilities
The phone endpoint can be configured with a specific address for the site hosting that phone. This address gets prompted to a 911 PSAP operator in cas of an emergency outbound call. That’s good.
Also, for the frequent case nowadays where the user is in Work-at-home setting, that user has the possibility to manually enter a Personal Emergency address that supersedes the site emergency address configured by default for the same endpoint. That’s good, too.
However, there is no dynamic detection of the address (remote working vs office) like MS Teams has. Also, there is no possibility to get Corporate Security personnel added automatically to live conference on the outbound 911 call, like you can do it with MS Teams, either. All you can do is to notify SMS or e-mail, and that list of phones or emails is not granular per site, every 911 call will notify the same phone numbers via SMS or same people via Email.
4. No dial-by name capability in the IVR
For inbound calls handled by an Auto-Attendant, there is possible to dial the extension of the person. There is no possibility to route the call using dial-by-name feature.
5. Multilanguage – French
The system supports multiple languages. If you like the translations made by Google translate, you will be fine. I am not, especially for French Canadian locale.
6. Portability
You have no flexibility for the portability of the PSTN numbers your transfer to RingCentral. All you get is a date and time target for the transfer to happen, but if you are a big enterprise with thousands of DIDs to transfer over to RingCentral, you should expect a more thorough hand-over process where the new PSTN provider and the old one are on the same conference call while the customer confirms all numbers are operational before considering the portability process closed and successful.
7. Phone endpoint templates, manageability, and support
The RingCentral system works very well with Polycom VVX phones. However, if for whatever reason the phone cannot register or there are other communication issues, you are out of luck as an administrator, there is no visibility or possibility to trace the logs up to the root cause of the communication issue, Rincentral has no integration to the phone like an old Cisco Call Manager has. Same thing is true for controlling the template of keys pushed to the phone, if you want to standardise multiple types of phones with different number of lines, vs positioning of feature keys, you are out of luck. No possibility to centrally manage the SSL certificates if you plan on implementing 802.1x authentication.
8. Integration with CCaaS – call traceability
If the digital transition includes the transfer of a contact center to RingCentral cloud, that part is usually supported on a Nice InContact(CxONe) platform integrated with the UCaaS part from RingCentral. The users will be created manually, twice: once for RingCentral and once for Nice Incontact.
The PSTN connectivity for the contact center part (Nice InContact) is handled by the UCaaS (Rincentral). The phone number is provisioned on RingCentral and it must me configured as a CCRN type (contact center routed number)
Even if the PSTN contact center numbers are provisioned and call are handled by Ringcentral, you will not be able to see contact center related calls in the call logs and I find this unacceptable from an administrator point of view (no troubleshooting capabilities unless you replicate live the issue).