Question

Desktop app issues in Enterprise environments

  • 13 September 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 1540 views

I am looking for comments and suggestions on using the Desktop app in an enterprise environment. Below I will cover some of the issues we are having.


We are a new RC customer with 400 users. Our initial experiences with the Desktop app have been mixed. For example we have a branch that is using nothing but the desktop app. The main number rings to a ring group. The phones assigned do not all ring at the same time. Some do not even ring at all, but they might for the next call. We have made firewall adjusts onsite as per RC knowledge base articles. The other issue is that there seems to be no Admin install version of the MSI file. We have no problems with users being able to install without admin rights, but when you run the app a windows firewall exception notice comes up with DOES require admin rights. Since our users are not admins this presents a problem in Enterprise environments. As a work around I deployed a group policy that adds the following program path as an exception:

%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalRingCentralSoftPhoneAppSoftphone.exe


However if the user clicks cancel on the notice Windows actually puts a block on the softphone.exe. I am not sure if that overrides my exception.


Suggestions or thoughts?



4 replies

Robert - the RC Downloads page has two version of installers. Under the Users section the installers will install in the user's specific profile which appears to be what you are using. If you scroll down further there is an Administrators section which has the installers you would use for enterprise deployments and I believe that until recently they had this for the Windows version of the desktop phone. https://support.ringcentral.com/download.html



When I just looked it seems that they have removed the Windows desktop softphone and your only choice to pick is the RingCentral app which is Glip with some phone functionality integrated now. I'm pretty sure you can either ask support or your account rep to get you the enterprise deployable version of the desktop softphone as they need to keep providing it for customers who aren't deploying Glip.

Thanks for jumping in, Jeff.

I don't what happened (looking into it internally) but the download version for the RC Phone app under the User section is an MSI :/
Robert,

We are experiencing this Windows Defender Firewall issue as well.  Were you ever able to determine if a block is indeed put on softphone.exe when the user clicks Cancel on the Windows Firewall message?
old post, but getting the same thing, in further research it appers to be asking for INBOUND access on the windows built in firewall. I dont see a reason why any RC App should need Inbound port access. Outbound yes, inbound NO. 

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