Case study: University of Sheffield

The university implemented a UC system to cope wtih expansion of about 20 per cent

The University of Sheffield provides voice and data connections to thousands of students and staff at its city-wide campus, and in 2008 found that its existing telephone system could not be further expanded to support them.

“The existing platform was getting quite large and was based on one box on a fibre network – if that went down, so did the whole system,” says Mark Franklin, the university’s voice and data support manager. “We had reached the maximum number of ports we could configure on the network and there were supportability issues as well, so we needed to move forwards.”

To prepare for future expansion of about 20 per cent, the university switched its 10,000 voice connections from a previous Avaya telephony platform to the same vendor’s Communications Manager (CM) 5.0, which protects its existing IP PBX investment, provides a converged voice and data network and adds new UC features.

“The original plan was to give the students IP handsets, but unfortunately the cost of that meant we could not put one in each room,” says Franklin. “Instead, we used a third-party IPT solution that allowed students to use softphones. Moving forwards, we will start looking at softphones accessed via a portal from anywhere, so that members of staff can work from wherever they have to travel to as part of the job.”

CM 5.0 also provides the university with a voice portal running an interactive voice response application to help handle enquiries at its central switchboard.

“We are looking at implementing call reporting features, both for the contact centre and for IT helpdesk scenarios – first-line security and the like – but also in the future for recording calls around clearing house results and for the finance department, though we are not obliged to do so,” says Franklin.

The university is confident that its core IP network can handle the various the demands that providing students and staff with advanced voice and data communications will put on it.

“Over the past four to five years we have been building a LAN with resilience in the core anyway,” says Franklin.

“There are two Avaya CM 5.0 servers in the core IP, and there is loads of bandwidth all over the place – gigabit over fibre for most connections.”

Read here how various companies have harnessed the power of unified communications