Gruveo Gets a Major Update for Better Compatibility, New Features

We have just rolled out an important update to the Gruveo web app that boasts compatibility improvements as well as exciting new features. Find the full scoop below.

Safari Is Now a First-Class Citizen

We have improved Safari 11 compatibility even though Safari's WebRTC implementation remains limited. Switching from a one-on-one call to a group one or toggling call recording no longer means that the Safari users will automatically lose video. When switching to a group call, Gruveo will try to choose a video configuration suitable for most call participants, including the Safari ones. And toggling call recording will now have no negative effects for Safari users whatsoever.

Bye-Bye, Temasys WebRTC Plugin

The Temasys WebRTC plugin has served us well to enable Gruveo in the otherwise unsupported browsers (think Internet Explorer and older Safari), but the time has come to say goodbye. We dumped Internet Explorer support on the same day that plugin-less support for Safari 11 was released. And with older versions of Safari fading away, we feel that removing Temasys plugin support altogether will let us deploy our development resources more productively.

Safari Support Comes to the Embed API

In what has been a truly long wait for a lot of Gruveo developers out there, Safari support finally lands in the Gruveo Embed API. A newer version of the browser is required, namely Safari 11.1+ on macOS, or Safari on iOS 11.3+. See the Embed API documentation for the updated details on the supported browsers.

Dots in Handles and Room Names are Now Allowed

You can now use a dot (.) when registering a Gruveo handle or creating a call room. The handle or call room name cannot start or end with a dot, or have two or more dots next to each other. This change was prompted by more and more businesses looking to allocate multiple handles on Gruveo. Having the option to use the dot as a separator should give you more flexibility when getting Gruveo handles for your organization – think @acmeinc.support, @acmeinc.sales, @acmeinc.marketing etc.

A Better Call Button

We've listened to your feedback on the Gruveo call button, and we've made a couple of important changes. First of all, you can now explicitly choose whether clicking the button will start a video or a voice call. Second, we have removed the Gruveo branding and your @handle from the button, leaving the button title simply as "Video call" or "Voice call", with a respective icon. These changes are aimed at making the button more versatile and its functionality more understandable to your website visitors.

Do you have any questions on today's Gruveo update? Let us know in the comment section below, or get in touch with us directly!

Announcing the Gruveo Affiliate Program

We are excited to announce the launch of the Gruveo Affiliate Program! The program lets you make money by partnering with ​Gruveo as an affiliate and earning a whopping 25% recurring commission on any customers you refer.

Here is how it works: When you become an affiliate, we'll provide you with a special affiliate link. You'll then use that link to refer businesses in need of a​n easy-to-use video calling solution to Gruveo. When we receive a visitor through your affiliate link, we'll associate that visitor with your affiliate account. If they then order a Gruveo subscription, you'll receive a 25% commission on any payments they make.

The commissions are recurring, which means that you will receive income from referring a Gruveo subscriber for as long as they stay with us.

​We'll also provide you with a special Affiliate ​Dashboard where you can monitor your affiliate account activity, as well as with text links and banners to help you successfully promote ​Gruveo.

To learn more and sign up as a Gruveo affiliate, head to our Affiliate Program page today!

Gruveo API Now Supports Uploading of Call Recordings via FTP/SFTP

Call recording is a standard feature of the Gruveo API and SDKs that allows you to obtain HD-quality recordings of your users' conversations almost immediately after the call is over. Up till now, the API only supported uploading of the recordings to your Amazon S3 bucket, which wasn't the most convenient choice for some users. By popular demand, we are now extending the API's capabilities to also offer recording uploads via FTP/SFTP.

If you'd like FTP/SFTP uploading of call recordings to be set up for your API account, please contact us with the following information:

• Your API client ID (request one here)
• Protocol (FTP or SFTP)
• Hostname
• Port
• Username
• Password
• Directory (optional).

Please refer to the API/SDK documentation for details.

Test Drive Gruveo with Zapier

We have been working on developing Gruveo to work with Zapier and invite you to take it for a test drive. Zapier is an online automation tool that connects hundreds of apps, such as Slack, MailChimp, Calendly, and now Gruveo. You can automate repetitive tasks without coding or developers and it's easy enough that anyone can build their own app workflows with just a few clicks.

The new integration provides you with a Zapier action to create a new Gruveo call room and get its name and URL. While very simple, this integration makes truly powerful workflows possible – for example, automatically creating a Gruveo room for your Calendly appointments and emailing the link to the invitee.

Zapier requires all new integrations to start in an invite-only test mode. To get your invite for Gruveo, simply shoot us a message:

Developer Alert: Updating the Static Embed Code for Chrome 64

The recently released Chrome 64 brought an important change whereby by default, camera and microphone permissions cannot be requested in cross-origin iframes such as the Gruveo embed. If you are using static HTML <iframe> code to embed Gruveo on your website, it is important to make sure that it includes the allow="microphone; camera" attribute as specified in our developer documentation. Otherwise, the Gruveo embed will be failing with the "Cannot access camera and/or microphone" message.

If you embed Gruveo using JavaScript, you don't need to do anything because our JavaScript API inserts the allow attribute automatically.

We recommend using JavaScript to embed Gruveo to ensure that the latest compatible code is always used. If you are still using the static HTML method, now may be a good time to switch to the JavaScript approach instead. You can find the details in our API docs.