Yes, you've found it, it's this document!
Because the needs of our customers and therefore our priorities may change over time, and because our first focus is always quality and reliability, issues can come up that delay us from working on new features. Therefore, we prefer not to make any promises about when exactly features on our roadmap are going to become available, but we are happy to share what we plan to work on soon, and roughly in what order.
Recently launched - web-based audio
The ability to use web-based audio for participants in a scheduled CrankWheel meeting was launched on January 15th, 2023. This is a feature area that will need a fair amount of iteration and improvement over time. This first version should work for most cases, but is still marked BETA as it is a bit raw. We will be significantly improving this functionality over the next few months.
The above is part of our current big focus - web conferencing
CrankWheel has historically been extremely focused on the use case of adding a screen share to an ongoing telephone call, for example for use on cold sales calls, and making compatibility and reliability a top priority so that you can be sure that your prospect will be able to connect and see your screen share, no matter what device they have or how old of a browser they might have on there, without there ever being a download, install or registration required.
While we will continue with this focus, as it is our current majority use case, most of our work for the next year or more will be around adding features to cover more sales-related use cases. Some of those use cases involve pre-arranged meetings with multiple stakeholders, where a more traditional web conferencing experience is expected and preferred over a phone call plus screen share.
To this end, we are focusing on adding some of the more traditional web conferencing functionality, such as:
- Multi-participant web-based audio, which we've recently launched as mentioned in the section above, and will keep improving;
- Having all participants on webcam if desired (not just the presenter as is possible today);
- Allowing the presenter to grant presentation control to other participants, so that they can screen share into the meeting; and
- Adding chat and file transfer capabilities.
All of the above will be done in a way that preserves the simplicity and maximal compatibility that you should expect from CrankWheel.
Ongoing - bring your own VoIP and other integrations
In order to best support advanced use cases for enterprise customers, or for independent agents who are required to use certain VoIP software to make and record phone calls, we will also be incorporating the ability to "Bring your own VoIP" whereby you'll be able to use CrankWheel to do some basic call control for your existing VoIP solution, and use your VoIP solution instead of the built-in web-based audio in CrankWheel for making single- or multi-party calls where some or all participants may be on their phone rather than using their computer audio, all while preserving the ability to do session recording with mixed video and audio.
We're not sure yet where in the order of web conferencing related features the "Bring your own VoIP" functionality fits, but it ties into multi-party meetings in many interesting ways. We will learn as we go, and we think the right approach is to partner and integrate with several different VoIP providers.
Another area that we plan to develop continuously in parallel with our big new feature area of web conferencing, is deeper integrations with various CRM systems. This will include things such as being able to launch CrankWheel from a contact/lead page in your CRM and have their details pre-filled in CrankWheel and then have session details and recordings automatically added to that contact/lead in the CRM at the end of a session.
Finally, we will continue to improve our existing capabilities such as screen sharing, remote control, recording and sharing.
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