Dallas County has officially extended the coronavirus stay-at-home order to May 20, which means our remote work reality of video conference calls and Team chats is going to become a lot more “normal.” Dallas’ own telecom giant AT&T sees that critical need, and it’s hopping on the growing trend with a new collaboration to better manage voice, video meetings, and messaging from the comfort of your own home.

AT&T’s Office@Hand will now be powered by RingCentral, a California-based provider of enterprise cloud communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions. Office@Hand is a cloud-based solution that boosts on-the-go office productivity—essentially, an office in your hands.

The collaboration brings together industry-leading technology (RingCentral) and intelligent network and trusted business solutions (AT&T). RingCentral’s new video technology will give Office@Hand enhanced HD video capabilities, according to a joint announcement.

And, in further response to the COVID-19 pandemic, AT&T is offering its Office@Hand Premium solution at no cost for 60 days to keep schools, healthcare providers, and nonprofits connected.

The companies hope the move will help minimize the isolation people can feel while working at home, according to Roman Pacewicz, AT&T Business’ chief product officer. Pacewicz said it should help to better balance work with everything else that may be hectic during this time.

“The nature of work changed overnight, and video is now an absolute necessity to keep businesses moving,” Pacewicz said in a statement. “We’re all in this together, and we know that tools like AT&T Office@Hand are about more than just productivity.”

Office@Hand offers voice, fax, text messaging, and audio/video conferencing. With RingCentral, HIPAA- and FINRA-compliant capabilities for businesses are added, giving Office@Hand tight security and accessibility requirements.

RingCentral said it’s using its “superior carrier-grade cloud communications platform for HD voice and video” to power Office@Hand. Features include built-in quality-of-service reporting and robust end-to-end encryption. “The AT&T Office@Hand solution with the new RingCentral Video technology delivers a highly secure, modern voice and video collaboration experience to AT&T’s business customers to enable their employees to work productively from anywhere,” Anand Eswaran, president and COO of RingCentral, said in a statement.

The announcement comes in this new Zoom era we’ve seen emerge over the past few weeks. Many have noted that the Zoom video conferencing platform appears to be benefiting most from the national work-from-home movement—as The Verge points out, if the pandemic happened a decade ago, it would be all about Microsoft’s Skype.

But millions could be in danger. Personal Zoom videos have been left as viewable online, as reported in The Washington Post, putting users’ privacy totally at risk. And, “Zoombombing” is now a thing: Intruders are hacking into video calls and leaving inappropriate things in their wake. The FBI has even issued a warning about it.

It’s a new development—one that’s consistently being updated—that could cause millions to turn to alternatives.

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