Cheltenham Ladies' College

Following a formal tender process, we were awarded the contract to supply, install and maintain the college's new telephony solution, leveraging the investment in its existing local area network (LAN).

The solution has since been upgraded to the newest version, the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise (OXE) Purple, which has allowed them to migrate their hardware, licences, and handsets from the original evergreen and sustainable investment.

The OXE Purple uses cost-effective and environmentally friendly virtual server technology, enabling all its applications to run on a single server rather than multiple servers. This created an immediate saving on running and support costs.

On top of that, VoIP telephony was deployed throughout the campus to create an identical user experience. Alcatel-Lucent desktop handsets, complete with QWERTY keypad for dial-by-name and phone-to-phone text messaging, were provided across the entire college.

The college uses contact centre agent software when they experience increased call traffic, such as exam result announcements. As a boarding school, most pupils live outside Cheltenham or overseas and need to call to get their results. The contact centre allows the college to distribute calls to different staff members, queue calls and manage any messages left by pupils. Additionally, the system can be used to handle an influx of calls during an incident.

Integration with the college’s Microsoft Teams was crucial for this project; the college used the app to meet teaching and collaboration needs using its unified communications tools. Staff can use handsets or their Teams apps on their PCs or mobile devices with no apparent difference to the end user. The OXE Purple and Teams are seamlessly interchangeable to successfully unify all the college's communications tools, ultimately supporting the work of remote and mobile staff members.

The upgrade to OXE Purple saw the college switch to an all-SIP telephony solution for the first time. Having used these internet-based voice connections before as standby telephone lines, the impending ISDN switch-off meant the college needed a wholesale switch to SIP. Therefore, we used Gamma SIP services on their existing leased lines to support their migration.

We designed a resilient solution with a standby communications server, so that in the event of failure of the primary server, the secondary would maintain full telephony functionality. The two servers are in separate geographical locations to enhance the resiliency of the solution.

Hot-desking was crucial to the college as they wanted the teaching staff to have the ability to work in different areas of the campus while remaining easily contactable. Staff are now able to log in on any handset available to them!

Staff now benefit from unified messaging, receiving a sound file of voicemail messages attached to emails sent to a dedicated second inbox for easy retrieval.