Winter Release 2022. Secure, integrated, Cloudy new features.

2021 in one word: Cloud.

If I had to sum up the evolutionary path of the Imagicle products in 2021 in one word, I would have no doubt: Cloud.

Because the Imagicle Cloud offers the most comprehensive, flexible, and easy-to-use UCX Suite around, the Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite. And 2021 was a year of great growth for her!  

In 2021, we’ve upgraded our beloved UCX Suite to natively integrate with modern cloud calling platforms such as Webex Calling and Microsoft Teams.

To complete this evolution, we’ve introduced a new Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite offering, including a public cloud option crafted with these public cloud calling platforms in mind, offering easier activation and more competitive costs.

And last but not least, the cloud is also the house of our new baby: Imagicle Voice Analytics. 

All this news aligns with the goal we’ve given ourselves for this Winter Release: to rock your hybrid work, meaning that we want to help you enable a functional hybrid work model without letting go of the comfort of smart working and the productivity of the office.

But how did we make that possible, exactly? What’s the point of all of this? Well, let’s dive into each point in more detail.

Seatbelts fastened. 🚀

Imagicle Voice Analytics: get the real value out of your conversations.

The time has finally come for Santa to bring our customers and partners a very special gift: Imagicle Voice Analytics, the new tool we designed and engineered leveraging the latest AI and cloud technologies to allow you to extract information and data from the conversations you are already recording with Imagicle Call Recording. 

With automatic, multilingual transcriptions and Sentiment Analysis for potentially any recording, supervisors will be able to access the mine of information contained in recordings without having to listen to them one by one, saving time and therefore money. 

These are just a few of the benefits of Voice Analytics: I invite you to discover them all by reading the dedicated articles about Voice Analytics’s use cases for customer satisfaction and Voice Analytics’s security, but most importantly, by trying it out for yourself, as…

Drumroll! 🥁

Voice Analytics is finally in General Availability! 

It’s just arrived, and it’s already a bestseller, with the hundreds of companies who want to leverage actionable and automatically extracted data to increase customer satisfaction, understand at a glance if a call was positive or negative, optimize interactions, and more.

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Wanna see our Voice Analytics in action?
Register for the dedicated webinar and enjoy a live demo.

Wednesday, January 26, 11,30 AM

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Attendant Console for Webex Calling. The operator console that was missing.

For a few years now, we’ve had a firm commitment: to evolve our offer and our products to assist our customers in their journey to the cloud, with maximum flexibility, whether it’s a small step approach or a total migration (#callingyourway).

With this in mind, in 2021 we’ve been working on natively integrating the UCX Suite with Webex Calling, and today we have 2 pieces of news on that for you.

First, with great pride we announce that our Attendant Console for Webex Calling successfully passed the technical review by Cisco, giving the integration official General Availability! This makes Imagicle the only ecosystem partner to offer a flagship Cloud Attendant Console, complete with Advanced Queueing and Auto Attendant services, and fully compatible with all Cisco platforms: UCM, HCS, and Webex Calling, both multi-tenant and dedicated (former UCM Cloud). In addition, the solution offers maximum flexibility to adapt to mixed environments and to assist customers in migrating from one platform to another.

The same Attendant Console you already know can offer you an extended set of features, with the same user experience, on Webex Calling as well, whether the operator is using the Webex App or a physical Cisco MPP phone. 

Second, from Winter’22, the Attendant Console can display rich presence for colleagues on Webex, even as a collaboration tool only! 

The Attendant Console can support the operator in managing the call by summarizing the availability of colleagues, regardless of the collaboration tool they’re using, whether it is Cisco Jabber, Cisco Webex, or even Microsoft Teams, not to mention the integration with Microsoft365 calendars.

Introducing the new Imagicle Public Cloud offering.

And for those customers out there that are even more eager and hungry for cloud services, this summer we’ve introduced a brand-new Imagicle Cloud offer, specifically designed to enable simple, fast, more convenient integrations with modern cloud calling platforms, such as Webex Calling and Microsoft Teams. 

In fact, thanks to the new native integrations that we have developed exploiting the native APIs of these platforms, to use the UCX Suite you just need an internet connection: thanks to Internet Peering, all communications will transit securely even without the need of a private connection.

In short, your Imagicle apps are now available from the Cloud, as an easy and affordable Public Cloud service, meaning that with a simple OTT internet connection, you can enrich your Public Cloud Calling platform (Webex Calling and Microsoft Teams) with all the features it’s missing, leveraging your existing PSTN lines.

Simple, Secure, Single Sign-On.

As we’ve told you many times, security is a cornerstone of our product strategy, along with the other 3 pillars: performance, innovation, and leadership. So naturally, in Winter 2022 we’ve added a key element for security: support for modern protocols of Single Sign-On.

Sure, we could have just added a new feature in the UCX Suite, but we chose a different path. 

The Imagicle path. Maybe more layered, but surely more efficient. 😉

Starting from Winter 2022, Single Sign-On is available as a cloud service for cloud and cloud-connected UCX Suites (and soon, for Voice Analytics and Manager Assistant as well). 

Single Sign-On makes it possible to integrate the access to Imagicle applications with the main Identity Providers based on SAML or Open ID Connect standard protocol, such as Microsoft Azure AD, ADFS, Okta, Duo, and Ping Identity (and, in the future, our cloud SSO service will be able to evolve and support more of them, so be sure to stay tuned!).

We’ll definitely explore this topic in more detail in a dedicated article, but let me highlight the 3 main benefits.

First of all, SSO is a key piece to help our customers meet particularly demanding security regulations, such as ISO27001, that require sophisticated password management policies or 2-factor login processes. 

Second, end users will be able to access Imagicle applications with the same identity they already use to access other enterprise applications and with the same user experience. A single secure login for all Imagicle apps, for each user and device, granting the same experience everywhere.

Finally, customers who have already invested in the implementation of an enterprise Identity Provider to unify, standardize and control the authentication processes of their users, will be able to place all Imagicle applications under the same management, with an important return on investment and, above all, simplification of management.

And that’s not all…

As per the tradition of every release, Winter 2022 also brings several further improvements, not only in terms of bug fixes and solved vulnerabilities (I invite you to consult and subscribe to the dedicated newsletter), but also in terms of functionality, among which I would like to highlight two.

We have enhanced the capabilities of the “Service Manager” role for the Auto Attendant application: the user who is the Manager of one or more Auto Attendant services, in addition to being able to fully administer them, will also be able to monitor their performances, meaning that, from Winter 2022, they will also be able to consult practically all the reports available to analyze the traffic involving the services for which they are responsible. In this way, the potential of delegating the management and monitoring of one or more IVR services is complete: it becomes possible, for example, to delegate the person responsible for a location not only to the complete management, but also to the monitoring of call reception for their own location: they can change schedules, audio messages, behaviors and, from Winter 2022, keep an eye on the telephone traffic.

Finally, we have enhanced Contacts Manager’s contact search: have you ever had to search for a contact whose first or last name contains accented characters? Then you’ll know that it’s not always easy to type the search string correctly, because you may not remember which accent was used (è or é?). 

Or maybe you type it correctly, but the contact has been entered in the address book without the correct accented letter.

Starting Winter 2022, Contacts Manager helps you with that, as it is able to find your contacts regardless of the presence of any diacritic marks, including accents (e.g. “à”, or “é”), overlines (e.g. “ō”), overlays (e.g. “ø”), and regardless of how of you typed the search string.

Conclusions. 

Well, guys… The time to wrap up has come again.

The news is many and merry, and in plain Imagicle style, they’re surely not over yet. The Imagicle motto is “It’s always a matter of happy people” and the saying goes “Happiness consists in activity”. We haven’t – and won’t – stopped striving to bring you continuous innovation through product updates, security improvements, the latest AI/ML technologies, and more.

In Winter, it was the turn of Voice Analytics, Single Sign-On, Integrations with Webex Calling… And the flowers of Spring are just around the corner, so stay tuned for more good news!