Product Roundup: What’s new in Rocket.Chat 7.2

As we step into the new year, we’re excited to introduce updates that enhance your workspace security, increase team productivity, and make the work of Rocket.Chat admins easier and more streamlined. Let’s dive into the latest updates that will help you stay organized and connected like never before. 

Export E2EE conversations to preserve what counts

End users can now export end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) conversations directly from the encrypted rooms to fulfil your organization’s need for secure archiving and comply with data retention laws. 

Why exporting secure chat counts?

• Controlled sharing: You can securely share only relevant parts of an E2EE conversation with others without sharing the entire chat or adding users to encrypted rooms for one-off instances. This ensures sensitive information stays protected at all times. 
• Regulatory compliance: Export classified conversations to maintain records for compliance with data retention laws and industry regulations. 
• Record-keeping purposes: Archive crucial decisions or agreements made in E2EE rooms for future reference, track incidents and preserve knowledge.
• Disaster recovery: Ensure critical information isn’t lost due to server issues or accidents by exporting chats as a backup option to protect valuable intel. 

Things you need to know 

• No compromise in security: Only users with decryption rights (have access to encryption keys) can generate exports. 
• Secure export options: E2EE chats can be exported as a JSON or HTML file, but cannot be emailed for security reasons. 
• Enriched export data: JSON exports include room metadata (ID, name, members) along with the export details. ‍
• Flexible selection options: You can either manually select messages from E2EE rooms or batch select up to 50 at a time.

Improved VoIP calling experience

We launched the beta version of VoIP in 7.0. Thanks to all our early adopters for their feedback and inputs. We are now introducing some improvements to offer a better experience of VoIP calling within Rocket.Chat. 

Are you interested in exploring VoIP in the beta phase? Reach out to our team and we’ll help you set up. 

Updated voice calling permissions

We offer granular permissions for voice calling to ensure enhanced security, smoother workflows and greater efficiency by customizing access based on each user’s role. These are the 3 permissions that ensure voice calling works seamlessly for your workspace:

• Allow voice calls: Lets all users of the workspace access the voice calling feature. Enables teams to have real-time communication. 
• Manage voice calls: Grants admins with the ability to configure voice call settings and assign extensions to users. 
• View voice call extensions: Provides visibility into who is calling and the corresponding extension details. Helps with tracking and management. 

These updated permissions are designed to make managing voice calling easier, clearer, and more intuitive.

Standardized naming for integrated video conference chats 

Whenever you initiate a video call through a channel or DM, the chats you have during the meeting will be saved as a Discussion in Rocket.Chat. Having too many meetings is normal, but letting your workspace get inundated and cluttered with Discussions doesn’t have to be. 

• Since not every meeting includes chats, we will now keep Discussions hidden by default if no messages are exchanged during the meeting. 

• You have full control over how integrated video conference chats are named as Discussions in Rocket.Chat. We’ve introduced a default naming convention for video call Discussions: {date} - Video Call Persisted Chat. However, you can customize it to suit your needs, for example, moving the date to the end.

This reduces the sidebar clutter and makes it easier to find the right discussions after your meetings.

Key improvements

• Every admin wants a clean, organized database. To help you prevent duplicate entries and speed up your contact searches, we are introducing the new contacts.checkExistence endpoint. It lets you check if a contact exists and is already registered using an email, phone number, ID or the visitor source. 
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• OTR messages are meant to be private and not archived. Owing to this, OTR messages will be disabled by default when you select messages for export. 
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• We have improved the interface for App Settings with accordion grouping for each section, making it easier to navigate and configure. 
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• The Workspace and Subscription Admin pages have a refreshed UI with updated font scaling, vertically and horizontally centralized elements, better responsiveness based on your screen size and refactored components. This improves readability and ensures the interface is more user-friendly. 

For detailed information on the new updates and issues resolved in this version, refer to our official release notes.

How to update your workspace to the latest Rocket.Chat version?

SaaS workspaces

The release happens automatically on our cloud, so no further action is required from your side. However, remember that updating instances might take a few weeks, so don't hesitate to contact our support team if you need to update your version sooner. 

Self-managed workspaces

Depending on the installation mode, you might need to update your server manually. Check out our documentation for instructions.

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