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Our Cornell users have been getting firewall popups that they consider frightening (see attached). This user reported this occurred after they had FIOS newly installed in their home last weekend. We are wondering if installation packages could include firewall settings appropriate for all network types users may encounter.

At Cornell we centrally deploy the MSI version and our Desktop Support Team uses that to deploy and update versions on a campus-wide basis. They have noted that the package itself does not create the needed Defender firewall rules. They would prefer RingCentral provide these rules in their packaging rather than our IT creating work-arounds.

The following are comments from our Desktop Team:

'Currently Ring Central during it’s initial installation does not create the necessary firewall rules. This creates an issue for environments such as Cornell’s where most users do not have local administrative privileges. Meaning they are unable to actually click OK on the firewall prompt. If they click cancel it actually creates a block firewall rule, meaning it will actually restrict usage of Ring Central on a fresh install. Not a great user experience and potentially a lot of headache for the support staff.

While Ring Central is installing it is doing so with the administrative privileges that users lack. It would be ideal if the installation of Ring Central also created the firewall rules for Ring Central. I am not a programmer so I cannot speculate the ease with which this can be done but I envision two avenues. One is the app just creates a baseline set of firewall rules, those rules being the same for every install. The second would be creating a command line switch for the install. The command line switch would be much like the ALLUSERS=1 or AUTOUPDATE=FALSE switches currently in place for Ring Central MSI installs.

Cornell would prefer that the installer just creates the rules while it installs Ring Central. Ideally it would create the rule for all three profiles Domain, Public, and Private. This way it works no matter what network they are connected to. It should also restrict the firewall rules to just the ringcentral.exe app. That way the hole it pokes in the firewall is much smaller than just opening a port to any program.'

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We would like RC to consider these changes to the software packaging. Please let us know how we can advance these changes.