RingCentral has long been a maker of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony solutions aimed primarily at midsize and larger businesses, and the company included video conferencing as a feature in those solutions. But RingCentral Meetings (which begins at $14.99 per user per month for the Essentials plan) is the company's first stab at breaking this feature out into its own product platform. While it's a solid solution at a competitive price, its collaboration features lag just slightly behind ClickMeeting, our Editors' Choice winner in this category.
Pricing and Plans
While there is a free plan, most users will likely want to start with the $14.99-per-user-per-month Essentials Plan because it includes such features as phone support, Single Sign-On (SSO), and the ability to dial out to join a conference. In addition, it eliminates the 40-minute cap on group meetings that the free plan enforces. If you need more than 1,000 minutes for Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) calls, then there is an Advanced plan for $19.99 per user per month. The PSTN minutes specifically apply to the Call Me function, which lets the service dial your phone and hook you into the meeting rather than you dialing in via one of the provided phone numbers or using the built-in computer audio.
The Advanced plan raises the limit to 2,500 Call Me minutes and enables a usage dashboard and service-level agreement (SLA) for when things get out of hand and you need mission-critical help. All levels support dialing in to a conference by phone or VoIP, high definition (HD) video conferencing, and remote control. It's important to note that, while RingCentral Meetings does connect to other phone and VoIP systems, it is not a full-on VoIP solution itself. If you're looking for that kind of functionality, then you should check out the company's very popular VoIP solution, RingCentral Office
Setup and Configuration
RingCentral Meetings is a snap to sign up for. You enter in an email address and password, and choose a local phone number for dial-in purposes. After that, you're essentially good to go. While most users will find the included dial-in number enough, you can also include third-party dial-in instructions if you prefer using another conferencing bridge. For those that need it, there's even a toll-free number available for an additional $4.99 per month. Participants who want the optimal experience will need to download the RingCentral Meetings application for Android, iOS, Mac, or PC. Downloading and installing this is a relatively painless experience, however, and I had no trouble doing so, joining a conference on either my mobile device or desktop. If you don't need to share your screen or use advanced participant controls, then it's also possible to join using just a web browser.
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Once a few participants have joined, there are two basic modes for video conferencing. The first is called "Speaker Mode" which shows the current speaker as the largest video feed. Alternatively, you can switch to "Gallery View" and show up to 49 participants at the same time. While Adobe Connect offers unlimited feeds, the 49-participant gallery view is still a very generous number considering that even Cisco WebEx Meetings only offers 25. I also didn't notice any significant voice or video lag when I used the service over my 300 megabit per second (Mbps) internet connection.
To help increase collaboration, RingCentral Meetings also sports a lively whiteboard feature with quite a bit of flexibility in terms of drawing tools. While not everyone will need it, having this form of collaborative tool readily available isn't just handy, it's a key enabler for telecommuting's viability. It's no longer necessary to appear in person to express your ideas to the rest of the team. In addition, it's possible for more than just the primary presenter to share his or her screen. I can see that capability being helpful in training scenarios where you might be assisting multiple attendees at the same time. While this capability helps set RingCentral Meetings apart, it can also quickly eat up screen real estate, which means real-life usage will likely be a bit limited.
Meeting moderators are also well served with readily available controls that include buttons to mute and unmute attendees. Hovering your mouse along the bottom of the screen will also open settings for audio, video, and chat. Meeting participants can also raise their hands or initiate a private chat with any other participant.
That is another often underrated capability that I have sometimes found critical to maintain some semblance of order during a lively presentation. I did, however, miss the incredibly organized question-and-answer (Q&A) feature found in ClickMeeting . Anything else just feels a bit like a step backward from that.
Recording Limits
Recording is a one-touch operation but it's only available as an offline function, which means you can only record meetings as video files to a local hard disk, not a cloud target such as a publicly available folder on Dropbox Business , for example. That's a significant ding as it cripples RingCentral Meetings' ability to easily share videos. You can, of course, upload recorded videos manually to services such as YouTube or Vimeo after the fact, but it would be nice to have some level of integration with a third-party service to make this a one-step process for people who need to record and share webinars.
Still, recording is an easy-to-use feature that can be initiated on demand or simply activated by default for all attendees under the Recording Settings tab in the admin portal. That way, at the very least, you can ensure that everyone has a copy. However, this is doable only in the desktop version; those accessing the meeting with a mobile device will need some other way of downloading the recording.
A downside to RingCentral Meetings is that it doesn't come equipped with its own collaboration, calendar, and task management service. For this, the company wants you to download its free Glip app that essentially competes with Microsoft Teams . It's a way for attendees to chat with each other and push files back and forth during meetings. In terms of calendaring, however, I felt this was a little annoying.
Glip does integrate somewhat with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook's calendar, or similiar services. But only in the sense that it can display existing meetings and events in those calendars. It doesn't allow you to push directly to them. This seems to be a needless step in this day of simple integration between cloud services, especially since the RingCentral Meetings desktop app can generate Outlook or Google Calendar invites on its own.
Seems to me that most folks would simply want to integrate with whatever scheduling tools they're using now rather than having to jump through an extra, and mostly unnecessary, RingCentral step first. Microsoft Teams can do all of this and more in one seamless product.
Another hoop you might end up jumping through is attempting to push a file to an attendee who is not in your organization and therefore not on your instance of Glip. Apparently, if that happens, you're out of luck inside RingCentral's app portfolio. The one way you can share a file inside RingCentral is to ignore Glip and use the mobile version of Meetings (though this has a hard dependency on having an external business file sharing resource, such as Dropbox Business or Google Drive for Work.
Failing that, you're all of the way down to simply emailing your file to its intendend recipients. It's a little mystifying why this didn't make it into the desktop app at the very least. I would expect something like this to be folded directly into RingCentral Meetings, but having to download it separately will remain a minor annoyance for the time being, though, hopefully, RingCentral will address it in an upcoming release.
Lots of Promise
RingCentral Meetings is a bit of a mixed bag.On one hand, it's very sleek and good looking and certainly has a serviceable feature set.On the other hand, it's somewhat fractured compared to what products such as ClickMeeting offer in terms of collaborative ability.Yet, it also supports large-scale video conferencing at 49 participants, so it has some bragging rights there.Ultimately, it left me with mixed feelings, but it's hard to deny that having all of this functionality is a significant value add for small teams, plus it blows more no-frills solutions, such as Zoho Meeting , clean out of the water. Overall, it very nearly rises to the level of an Editors' Choice product, but simply needs a little more polishing and feature adds to get there.
RingCentral Meetings is a low-cost, high-value video conferencing solution that very nearly hits a home run but has problems in a few critical areas. Still, it's hard to argue with a free plan that offers so much value.
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