VQCM 3.5 incrementally moves things forward again. For a full list of what’s changed, please read the release notes that are available on vqcomms.com.
Highlights include:
- “Search” has been refined to allow the selection of the resource type being searched (User, Space, Call etc)
- We’ve started the process of separating out Roles in Activity; this allows the Participants to be grouped by Role. Role groupings can be minimized and the number of Participants per role is displayed
- Further refinements to Activity include separating out Space members into a separate coApp.
- Kibana now appears in the navigation panel on the left-hand side. Legacy analytics and dashboards now have ‘end of life’ notifications; we plan to remove them completely at 3.6
- “One time” or “Temporary” Scheduled Call functionality has been refined substantially with a major usability improvement for WebRTC usage scenarios. VQCM now creates the Space at schedule time and marks the Space “inactive” on CMS so that nobody can join the Space. This allows us to access the Space Secret and make it available as part of the information for joining the Call (the all-important ‘click-to-call’ hyperlink for making WebRTC calls really easy is now possible). At call run-time, the Space is enabled several seconds before its needed and participants can join the Space. The scripting language support for Email Templates has been updated to allow access to Pin, Call Id, Secret without having to loop through the Roles collection for Single Role Space Templates.
- Scheduled Calls can now have Setup and Tear-Down times. Both are disabled by default and can be enabled via Scheduled coApp settings on UX Profile. Start time is when the meeting is due to start (people walk into a room and expect the call to be ready); setup time is the time allocated to get the room ready. As an example: if a meeting is due to start at 9.00 and requires 15-minute setup, set start time as 9.00 and specify 15 minutes start time. The Call will start on CMS at 8.45; The Activity UI will show the call being in ‘setup’ mode between 8.45 and 9.00. Tear-down works in a similar manner. Calls that do not have setup/tear-down defined appear as they have in previous releases. Adding Setup/tear-down at 3.5 is a precursor to Recurring Calls at 3.6.
- Help is now available from the left-hand navigation panel; the online user guide documentation available on vqcomms.com is now also contained within the VQCM VM and can be accessed directly from the UI. Also included are installation, configuration and usage videos. Moving forwards, changes to our processes will ensure that the Help material is in synch with the release (at 3.5, the new functionality changes are not in the help content).
- VQCM-Admin has been updated to allow Outlook plug-in version management.
Advance notice: ‘legacy’ (pre 3.1) Elasticsearch indexes (indexes prefixed with ‘transformed’) will be removed from VQCM 3.6. We don’t think this will impact anybody but are calling it out just in case somebody is using the original indexes that were replaced at 3.1 by CallAnalytics, ParticipantAnalytics, Callbridge, CMS Alarms, Tenant State and System State indexes.
To upgrade, please mail support@vqcomms.com who will mail you details of an updated pre-upgrade-check script; copy that onto your system, run it and let them have the results. If it’s clean, they’ll update your account to have download access to VQCM 3.5. If the script identifies issues, support will work with you (or, if you are customer where we cannot access your system, they’ll provide you guidance on what to do) to clean up the state of your system and then give you access to the upgrade images.
Coming next:
We’re working now to deliver VQCM 3.6 in the mid-October time-frame. VQCM 3.6 is scheduled to feature Lobby, Recurring Calls, Active Speaker and Elastic search 7 (with updated Kibana. We’ll also be switching index management to Elastic’s Index Lifecycle Manager – ILM – model).