RingCentral: In-Depth
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RingCentral: Cloud-Based Phone and Fax Services
RingCentral was founded in 2003 and has invested heavily in their business phone and fax services. The company offers three core product lines: RingCentral Fax, RingCentral Professional and RingCentral Office. RingCentral Fax is well-suited for people who only need a fax service, and the company’s fax plans are some of the highest value and full featured available. RingCentral Professional is designed for businesses that prefer to operate primarily using mobile phones, but want to have a dedicated business phone number through which employees can be reached. This product allows businesss to take advantage of the many benefits of a business phone system without losing the flexibility of mobile phones. All RingCentral Professional plans includes features like an auto attendant, corporate voicemail and online fax services.
RingCentral Office functions more like a traditional phone system, by incorporating traditional looking office phones with buttons to transfer calls, automatically reach voicemail, etc. Unlike traditional phone systems howeever, Office doesn’t require customers to purchase or maintain anything besides the phones themselves. When someone signs up for an Office plan, the phones are simply shipped in the mail preconfigured, so all the customer has to do is plug the phones into an Internet connection and set their preferences for the system using the web interface. To use a little jargon, RingCentral Office is a VoIP based business phone system.
RingCentral Fax Samples (click images to expand)
RingCentral’s Fax Services
Fax 500: RingCentral’s Fax 500 plan includes up to 500 sent or received fax pages per month for $9.99 per month or $95.88 per year. The company recently ended phone support for their fax plans in favor of their online case management system. All fax customers now submit “cases” describing their issues and an agent will respond within 24 hours. All of RingCentral’s fax plan include access to their smarthpone apps and their downloadable softphone (only the fax features work on the softphone for fax only accounts). The company has also recently added a HIPAA conduit feature in the settings that allow companies to maintain HIPAA compliance while using their service. RingCentral will not, however, sign a Business Associate Agreement for fax only customers. They will however sign this for RingCentral Office customers with twnenty or more users. The Fax 500 plan’s low cost, fair number of included pages and abundance of features make it a great choice. The only significant feature that RingCentral lacks is e-signing, which is only offered by eFax and HelloFax.
Fax 1,000: RingCentral’s Fax 1,000 plan includes up to 1,000 sent or received fax pages per month for $17.99 per month or $155.88 per year.
Fax 2,500: RingCentral’s Fax 2,5000 plan includes up to 2,500 sent or received fax pages per month for $59.99 per month or $599.88 per year.
Fax Unlimited: The Fax Unlimited plan costs $49.99 per month or $479.88 per year and includes unlimieted sent or received pages, but RingCentral restricts “unlimited” with their Fair Use policies. In reality, there is a limit, it’s just presumably a high number which isn’t published. This plan is designed for companies that want one plan for all their whole company, but would like to have multiple fax numbers. This would be particularly beneficial for a situation like a law firm that wants to give each attorney their own number, so faxes meant for one specific attorney aren’t sent to a general fax line and possibly seen by people other than the intended atttorney.
RingCentral Phone Services
RingCentral Office: RingCentral Office is a high quality, full-featured business phone system. You can view the company’s pricing plans here. Prices range from $19.99/ month/ user to $64.99/ month/ user depending on the plan choice and number of users.
RingCentral Professional: RingCentral Professional is the company’s virtual PBX product, and it is extremely powerful. If your workforce is usually out of the office or you don’t care about desktop phones, use Professional to turn your mobile phones into a business phone system. Click here to view pricing plans. Prices range from $9.99/ month/ user to $39.99/ month/ user depending on the plan choice and number of users.
RingCentral Apps
RingCentral Offers iOS and Android apps that provide comprehensive access to the vast majority of the service’s features. Reviewing call logs and messages and making calls are extremely intuitive, however navigating through the settings, which are broken into “application settings,” “extension settings” and “phone system,” can be a bit challenging. However, the ability to change greetings, business hours, forwarding settings and more are all available through these smartphone apps.