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brent-restivo1417 avatar image
brent-restivo1417 asked benjamin-dean commented

Desktop app integration for Citrix Receiver

U.S. account.

I was told after we initially signed up that the desktop app would not work in our cloud desktop environment. Is this something that is being worked on currently? We were very much looking forward to using the desktop app when we signed up, but cannot at this time with our environment.

We currently use the Citrix Receiver application through Diamond IT, running Windows server edition.

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benjamin-dean avatar image
benjamin-dean answered benjamin-dean commented
Hello Brent,

I have not previously used the virtualization technologies you listed (Citrix Receiver and Diamond IT), so if you say the desktop app doesn't run on your VM...I will trust you.

You are always welcomed to reach out to your RingCentral Account Executive to see if there is a solution for your needs, but I'm not aware of a soft phone we recommend installing in a VM or virtualized infrastructure.

To be quite honest, I am not sure I would recommend anyone installing and executing a soft phone on a virtual machine of any type for business purposes. Maybe for some college kids, development testing, or a hackathon project...but not for business. My biggest reason for saying that is because I am quite certain there will be a dramatic loss of quality in the call. The quality of RingCentral's voice calls is one of the biggest reasons businesses choose RingCentral; the quality and flexibility of our products and services.

Within a virtualized environment, the virtualized machine's container is allocated resources from the host such as memory, networking, etc...if you have multiple people utilizing the host services (or if the host needs those resources and scales back) you will most certainly experience a phone call full of noise, pops, gaps, and perhaps even dropped call(s).

Additionally, due to the variances between the  containers which the various virtualization service providers implement to mount the slave machines, I am guessing (but our engineers would know better) poses a large challenge to ensure your satisfaction with the desktop phones we provide because we would have to stretch our engineering staff out more to maintain the same QoS as you receive with a native installation today. (but that last part is just me guessing)

Does this provide an answer to your question please?
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brent-restivo1417 avatar image brent-restivo1417 commented ·
We were actually hoping to utilize the Outlook integration, more than anything. I would agree that we would rather setup a dedicated PC to run a softphone, but all of our employees would benefit form the Outlook integration and the desktop messaging associated with the desktop app.
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benjamin-dean avatar image benjamin-dean commented ·
That makes good business sense, have you tried using it to see what happens? I never have used any of our services or integrations in a virtualized environment, so I don't know what will happen (the above was a recommendation based on experiences using other real time communication protocols and services in virtualized environments without luck).

From my experience, the latency involved in addition to the shared/limited resources in a virtual environment has too great a performance impact for what I would consider business-grade quality.

You are welcomed to try, just as long as you're aware that there may be issues (even beyond quality) which could be problematic. I would highly recommend you reach out to your Account Executive to see if there is an alternative solution, and if you choose to try using the Outlook integration in a VM...does RingCentral still provide you any support?
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brent-restivo1417 avatar image brent-restivo1417 commented ·
Our IT company must install the software on the server side, but when we started asking the questions, (according to them) they reached out to RingCentral and determined that the applications would not work/were not designed to work in the cloud environment at this time.
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benjamin-dean avatar image benjamin-dean commented ·
There's not much I or anyone could do at this point to help resolve that if both your IT department and RingCentral technical support determined this was not feasible.

So sorry.
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