RingCentral Webhooks Introduction
Webhooks make server-side notification integrations so easy that they have been described as magic. RingCentral is happy to have recently announced our initial release of webhooks support and this article describes the release in more detail.
Here are some ways webhooks support popular customer use cases:
Post new voicemails to chat
Gone are the days when people only listened voicemails on their phone. While RingCentral allows you to send your voicemails to your email out of the box, our customers want to send their voicemails to a variety of chat-based collaboration services like Glip. With webhooks, it’s easy to set up a service to post your voicemails to nearly anywhere you wish.
To post your voicemails to Glip or another chat service, you can set up a service that listens for new voicemails using a webhook and then post voicemail metadata and streaming media recording URLs to chat services for both notification and playback.
Alert on new 911 calls augmented with E-911 locations
A popularly requested service with our customers is to send SMS alerts when users dial 911. As a cloud communications service, RingCentral numbers can be registered with E-911 addresses which are useful for private security staff to assist in the event of an emergency.
Using webhooks, an app can be set up to receive presence events for outgoing calls, filter those calls for 911 calls, do a look up for the senders E-911 address and then send an alert with the number and E-911 location to security staff using a variety of means including SMS, email, chat, etc.
Server vs. client-side notifications
Of note, webhooks are are specifically for server-based apps that are available on and can be be reached over the Internet. They are not used for browser-based apps because a webhook URL is needed for the RingCentral service to post to and our PubNub transport should continue to be used for browser-based apps.
Getting started
The following are some resources to help you get started on webhooks.
