Cloud 4.2

Managing Cloud releases Earlier releases
Last updated September 27, 2018

Introduction

These release notes provide you with information about the latest upgrade to the StarLeaf Cloud, Portal, and endpoints. This is a feature release and is effective from December 2016.

These release notes also document StarLeaf Microsoft Outlook Add-in for Windows.

All upgrades take place outside of normal office hours for all regions. Endpoints automatically restart and reconnect to the Cloud after the upgrade.

StarLeaf operates a system of rolling upgrades across our data centers, which are distributed globally. New features may be enabled separately.

New features

Cloud version 4.2 provides the following new features, which are each described below:

Feature Description
Improved Skype for Business interoperability

A successful call through a restrictive firewall to a Skype for Business client is now more likely because:

  • Cloud 4.2 changes the UDP port range that is used for calls to and from Skype for Business. This range now matches the UDP port range that is used by Skype for Business
  • where UDP is not possible, the call will use TCP

For more information, refer to Skype for Business and Lync Integration.
Breeze audio improvement

Breeze now includes automatic gain control for the microphone audio level. This feature will improve user experience in calls that include a Breeze user because excessive gain on laptop microphones causes audio distortion.
New audio codec Cloud 4.2 introduces AAC-ELD. This is a highly-efficient audio-compression standard that allows high-definition audio even in low-bandwidth conditions.
Strong passwords

If required, contact StarLeaf technical support to have strong password enforcement enabled for your organization. This causes new Breeze and Portal users to need to set passwords that include, for example, a mixture of character types and do not seem to be based on dictionary words.
Click-to-call improvements

Content send for browser-based video calling

Users of StarLeaf Click-to-Call browser video calling can now share their screen with the person or conference at the other end of the call. (In Cloud 4.0, participants using browser-based calling could receive, but not share content.) Click-to-Call is supported in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

The picture below shows a browser-based call with shared content.

TCP media support

With Cloud 4.2 StarLeaf browser-based video calling no longer requires UDP ports to be open on your firewall; however, StarLeaf calls prefer to use UDP if possible because that provides superior call quality.

Browser-based calling can now use TCP instead of UDP. This allows:

  • successful browser-based calling even where there is a corporate firewall that is configured to block UDP traffic
  • better performance where there is limited bandwidth

Issues resolved

Bug fixes effective in StarLeaf Cloud 4.2:

ID Description
10402 Guest users of StarLeaf Cloud can now dial the 7-digit conference number. They no longer need to dial the complete conference URI.
10437 StarLeaf Cloud upgrades will no longer overwrite settings for third-party microphones attached to StarLeaf room systems.
10500 In the previous version, the sending of DTMF tones failed in a call that was using the StarLeaf Endpoint Control API. StarLeaf Cloud 4.2 fixes this issue.
10456 The link for Skype for Business clients to join conferences from an iPhone now behaves as expected. This is the link in the StarLeaf Portal page ‘How to join your StarLeaf video conference’.

StarLeaf Microsoft Outlook Add-in for Windows

Download the latest version of the Outlook Add-in here.

New features

Feature Description
Meeting room calendar integration

If you use Outlook Calendar to schedule meeting rooms, it is useful to integrate that with the StarLeaf Outlook Add-in. This means that when a user schedules a video meeting, and books a meeting room, the Join Now button on the meeting room system in that room will automatically light up when the meeting is due to start.

To enable this feature, you must contact StarLeaf technical support.

For more information about the StarLeaf Outlook Add-in, refer to Outlook Add-in for Administrators

Known limitations

For interoperability issues, refer here.

Reference ID Description
5454 Breeze full screen mode is not supported on Mac OSX versions below 10.7.
9922 Limitations in the add-ins for Internet Explorer and Safari determine that, currently, calls from those browsers (WebRTC) to audio-only users are not supported.