RingCentral is one of the fastest growing communications platforms out there supporting messaging, video and phones. One of the core components to the platform for years has been the RingCentral Meetings (RCM) platform powered by Zoom on the backend. This rebranded third-party meeting technology seamlessly integrates with the phones and messaging at the core of the RingCentral Office platform, however, this arrangement is rapidly changing.

In April of this year, RingCentral announced their homegrown RingCentral Video (RCV) platform as another alternative. This development is not that surprising given the negative attention Zoom received recently around the security of its platform, along with the fact that Zoom launched its own Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform last year. All things considered, this seems like a good time for RingCentral to move its technology in a different direction.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made widespread remote work the “new normal” — business analysts predict that 25 to 30 percent of people will still be working from home multiple days per week even at the end of next year.

It’s critical that business and IT leaders ensure they are giving users the tools they need to be as productive and secure as possible while working from home. This is done by creating categories of users based on their work styles and technology needs and then providing the appropriate tools. Here are five factors that business and IT leaders should consider as they seek to refine and optimize the work-from-home user personas within their organizations.

When the coronavirus pandemic prompted a massive increase in remote work across the country in mid-March, countless customers came to CDW asking to purchase videoconferencing tools. Makes sense, right?

Yes — until you consider that some of these companies were already paying for collaboration suites that have videoconferencing capabilities; the companies simply had never used them.

While many organizations have adopted new collaboration tools in recent years, they often struggle to take full advantage of them. Here are five ways to get the most out of these essential solutions.

The asterisk has long been used to highlight exceptions or to call attention to a footnote or annotation. For example, a home run record that was influenced by an extended baseball season was noted with an asterisk. This mark is also used to call out legal terms or extended information on a topic.

I think we should be using an asterisk in our conversations about Industry 4.0. This blog explains why I chose an asterisk instead of some other mark in my description of Industry 4.0*.

Here’s a bit of good news for businesses that have made the shift to remote work: If you give your employees what they need to do their jobs, having them work from home can boost the bottom line.

How individual companies enable remote work depends on their industries and staffing, of course, but in our experience at CDW, most invest in a similar set of connectivity tools and services. Here’s a look at three of those solutions, and some thoughts on how they can help remote workers be productive.

2020 has been an incredible year for Microsoft and especially for Microsoft Teams. With many organizations quickly adopting new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has seen a meteoric rise in usage for meetings and collaboration. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that by the end of April 2020, usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users, a massive increase from the 44 million users reported the previous month.

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is that the platform is growing and adding new capabilities on a seemingly weekly basis. As organizations look for new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams into their business processes, they will soon discover solutions for customized workflows, business process automation, direct integrations with Microsoft and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience, and even industry vertical-specific functionality for supported tenants.

To help organizations discover some of these capabilities, I compiled a list of four unique use cases that organizations might consider for the next stage in their Microsoft Teams journey.