Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has upgraded its cloud-based video and communications platform Rainbow to enhance user experience and facilitate advanced interactions between larger groups of participants. Over the past months, the global Rainbow platform has seen a significant growth in usage as companies and organisations worldwide have adopted the solution to maintain business continuity while ensuring secured remote working for their employees during the crisis.
The enhancement of the platform is said to further improve the collaboration experience for Rainbow users while supporting safe working practices and teamwork during social distancing. The evolution of the user experience centres around four keys areas: ergonomics, video-conferencing, audio-conferencing, and time management.
“Each evolution of the platform ensures that Rainbow continues to be the easy-to-use, flexible and multi-device solution for secured productive collaboration that we designed it to be,” said Moussa Zaghdoud, Executive-Vice President of the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Cloud Communication Business Division. He added, “The needs of our users are constantly evolving and we are dedicated to staying one step ahead by offering them features and capabilities that will add new benefits and accelerate their digital transformation. We also work closely with our partners and customers to ensure the best experience for their users.”
The latest version of Rainbow offers a streamlined design and user experience for enriched collaboration, facilitated by an updated professional interface for more efficient interactions. Updates, including quick action buttons, intuitive icons, and a simplified navigation, make the platform even more user-friendly. To enhance user comfort and boost user adoption, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has integrated more bespoke options, including customisable character sizing to increase legibility for visually impaired users and bidirectionality that supports non-Latin-based languages and allows content to be viewed ‘right to left’.
Video conferencing now offers various video-stream layouts for more personal interactions combined with a larger conferencing capability of up to 120 active participants. Active speaker video is automatically displayed to all participants, while Active Gallery and Active Grid View can be manually selected to display up to 12 video participants simultaneously. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has also integrated audio quality control algorithms to ensure optimal sound quality and alert the user of any network quality issues.
Rainbow’s new time management features allow organisations to elevate productivity and simplify remote working for employees. Real time tracking has been integrated into the platform to monitor audio and video meeting activity and Artificial Intelligence capabilities are used to auto-regulate participant speaker time. An easy-to-use meeting scheduler has been added to enable one-click instant meeting planning by identifying the availabilities of the conference’s participants. It also lets users invite participants from within Rainbow, regardless of whether invitees have a Rainbow account. In addition, users can now remain connected by switching active calls from mobile to laptop seamlessly, or vice-versa.
“The new Rainbow will deliver real added value to our customers and their teams, but we’re not stopping there. We are already working on additional developments, including a Rainbow webinar mode,” said Samuel Tourbot, Head of the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Cloud Business Engine.
“Because data integrity is critical, we are also finalising an end-to-end encryption model for audio and video conversation for Q4 2020. Another objective is to be the first European vendor listed in the UCaaS Gartner Magic Quadrant to propose up to 50 simultaneous videos in mosaic mode before the end of the year. Lastly, to address customer demand, Rainbow will also be able to host up to 1000 participants by early 2021,”said Moussa Zaghdoud.
