Big UC News from Meta, Avaya, RingCentral, Microsoft and OpenAI

Meta Closes Workplace, Endorses Zoom’s Workvivo As Alternative

Meta is shuttering its enterprise communications business, Workplace, while recommending customers migrate to Workvivo By Zoom.

As first reported by TechCrunch, Meta is closing an iteration of Facebook that had been designed to facilitate communication and collaboration between business teams and external networks.

Meta intends to maintain the platform operationally until September 2025. Workplace will then be read-only until May 2026 before being entirely shuttered.

Meta’s Workplace Help Centre posted an update:

We’ve made the difficult decision to close Workplace from Meta, which will be going away in 2026. We understand that this decision will be disruptive to the businesses, organizations and partners that rely on Workplace every day. Our priority is to make the transition as smooth as we can.”

Workplace users can download their data, including profile information, posts, and chat messages, until May 31, 2026, using the “Download your data” button in settings, provided their Workplace admin has enabled this feature.

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Avaya and RingCentral Launch Hybrid Solution, Expand Partnership

Avaya and RingCentral have announced that they will be providing Avaya customers with a range of new tools and solutions, including a new hybrid offering.

Announced at Avaya Engage – the company’s flagship event – the hybrid solution will combine RingCentral’s AI-powered cloud business communications capabilities with Avaya’s Aura platform.

“Our expanded partnership with RingCentral enhances communications and collaboration experiences for our global customers,” said Alan Masarek, Avaya CEO. “This integration further demonstrates our commitment to innovation without disruption. We are empowering our customers to operate where and how they want – on-prem, private cloud, or public cloud – without missing a beat.”

The solution promises users of both Avaya Aura and Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) the ability to “seamlessly” collaborate with each other. It also allows Avaya enterprise customers to use either Aura or ACO for call control functionality.

The companies also outlined the ability to combine existing Avaya solutions with RingCentral’s video calling, messaging, and RingSense AI features as an example of the “additional value” that the hybrid solution brings.

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EU Set to Issue Antitrust Charges Against Microsoft Despite Teams and Office Uncoupling, Microsoft Also Announces ‘Places’ App For Seamless Flexible Working

The European Commission will soon announce new antitrust charges against Microsoft, according to Financial Times sources.

Citing “three people with knowledge of the move”, the publication revealed that the potential charges could come within “the next few weeks”. The charges relate to its bundling of Microsoft Teams and Office. The European Commission launched a formal investigation into Microsoft’s bundling of products after collaboration competitor Slack filed a complaint in 2020.

Last year, Microsoft unbundled the platforms – first brought together in 2017 – in Europe. Then, in April, the enterprise tech juggernaut took the practice worldwide, referencing “feedback” from the European Commission. In doing so, many suspected that Microsoft aimed to avoid the antitrust ruling.

However, EU officials still appear to have concerns that the organisation has not gone far enough to enable market fairness.

In other Microsoft news, the tech giant launched an AI-powered “Places” app to facilitate seamless flexible working and workplace management in the hybrid era.

Intending to address the challenge of encouraging productive and rewarding flexible working that benefits workers and employers, Places intends to make coordinating in-office time and collaboration more efficient.

Places features are accessible across commonly used platforms like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, enabling flexible work coordination and connection within a user’s regular workflow.

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OpenAI Launches GPT-4o, A Major (And Free) ChatGPT Upgrade

OpenAI has launched GPT-4o, a major (and free) ChatGPT upgrade that means the model is significantly faster and can rapidly process images, audio, and text.

Announced during an OpenAI live stream on Monday by OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, GPT-4o is a “much faster” iteration of OpenAI’s famous ChatGPT product that enhances “capabilities across text, vision and audio”.

OpenAI wrote in an accompanying blog post:

GPT-4o (‘o’ for ‘omni’) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs.”

OpenAI highlights that GPT-4o demonstrates impressive audio input response times, averaging 320 milliseconds and reaching as fast as 232 milliseconds, which it suggests is comparable to human conversational response times. Its performance in processing English text and code matches OpenAI’s advanced GPT-4 Turbo model, with notable advancements in handling non-English languages.

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