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Building on RingCentral: Developing GenAlert's Real-time 911 Alerting & Reporting Capabilities to Improve RingCentral Users' Safety

by Nathan May 10, 2021

In today’s world where public safety is a major concern, it is important that all possible tools are available to assist the respondents when managing emergency situations.

Genesis for RingCentral

In today’s world where public safety is a major concern for all organizations, it is important that all possible tools are available to assist the respondents when managing emergency situations. Genesis developed GenAlert, a Ring Central solution that not only notifies the pertinent individuals when a 911 emergency call has been placed, in real-time, but also allows customizable additional actions to be taken such as Glip instant messaging, generating emails, sending SMS or text messages, triggering custom alarms like strobes, etc., plus many more…

The decision to begin developing GenAlert for RingCentral was a easy. Our development cycle typically begins with evaluating the available integration points, APIs and any other accesses to the necessary data. Typically, access to the necessary data is the difficult part; APIs are often not available or accessible externally, system design isn't condusive to integrating third-party solutions, data isn't available in a timely manner, etc. During the evaluation phase it was apparent we'd be able to work with RingCentral due to the extensive catalog of APIs, and additionally be able to provide features that were not possible on other systems. This gave us the confidence to engage deeper and start planning the addition of these features uniquely for RingCentral users.

During the development of GenAlert, Genesis recognized the requirement to perform many different tasks when a 911 call is placed. Genesis utilized many of Ring Central APIs such as Events & Notifications Subscriptions, Call Control, Call Recording, User Settings, Device, Call Log, GLIP, etc. to determine when calls happen, where the caller is, who to add to the audio stream, whether to record the call, etc. Since these requirements are fairly comprehensive, there are a variety of events occurring at the time a call is detected, during the call, and even after the call that need to be considered, monitored and recorded.

While developing GenAlert we were impressed with the knowledge and responsiveness of the Ring Central development team to our questions and concerns. The Ring Central development team added features and enhancements to APIs which helped both us and the customer in accomplishing what was required. They also explained in detail some caveats and issues that were not as well documented and the side effects or real-world implications of these. Initially in the early development stage of GenAlert we had almost daily email & voice communications with them to better understand the features and capabilities of the API’s. Also, the Community Pages were of great assistance in resolving some of issues we encountered during development.

In short with Genesis’ vast Telecom knowledge and experience combined with the exceptional help and support of the Ring Central development team and the development API tools available to us, the development of GenAlert went quite smoothly. Genesis GenAlert is our latest hosted solution available as a monthly service add-on for Ring Central users.

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