Coleg Glan Hafren

Coleg Glan Hafren is Cardiff’s largest further education college. It delivers 800 courses to 13,000 students from its main Trowbridge campus and three additional sites located around the city, including a plush hair and beauty salon called the Design Academy.

“Routing calls from Trowbridge through to the correct person was tricky. Up to 18 staff members could be sharing one telephone number, and since most teachers are generally unavailable by phone for the majority of the day, voicemails were often lost.”
— Gareth Burton, IT Manager, Coleg Glan Hafren.

The college had an aging voice network of 240 desk phones and Siemens Realitis switches at three campus sites. The Design Academy, however, was a separate entity with its own BT lines. With four sites and 600 staff served by this aging and inflexible  system, communications were becoming strained. As the college continued to expand, conducting moves, adds, and changes was costly; routing calls to the right extension was difficult; voicemails were lost. The college made the decision to deploy an IP-based unified communications (UC) system. The priorities for the new system included a fully customisable auto-attendant that allowed the recording of bilingual prompts, hunt group style overflow for incoming calls, call centre and softphone facilities, and call logging and reporting.

“With the ShoreTel system, our call handling has improved 100 percent. Auto attendant deals with the majority of incoming traffic, allowing callers to select an extension, dial by name, or by department.”
— Gareth Burton, IT Manager, Coleg Glan Hafren.

In ShoreTel, the college saw the opportunity to deploy a single, centrally managed system to replace its multiple PBXs. ShoreTel's system comprised a ShoreTel E1, three ShoreTel 120, and six ShoreTel 40 Voice Switches which plug into the LAN via Ethernet, support both IP and analogue phones, and are deployed in an N+1 architecture, so that if a switch fails or is isolated by a network fault, the phones automatically failover to another voice switch. The system was deployed within a week and a half, and configured for 600 users and 250 ShoreTel IP Phones. This has since been expanded to include the Design Academy, with 40 more IP handsets. Benefits include:

• Significant cost savings and efficiency gains realised by eliminating multiple PBXs and consolidating separate sites under one centrally managed IP unified communications system.
• Integrated voice applications improve call handling 100 percent; hunt group and automatic forwarding to mobile numbers ensures staff can be contacted when needed.
• Powerful voice messaging system supports a mobile workforce by including user-configurable call handling options and find-me routing. The voice messaging system can be accessed visually from ShoreTel Call Manager or the user’s Microsoft^® Outlook^® inbox.
• ShoreTel directory has been integrated with the college’s desktop Web application to allow users to search the ShoreTel Call Manager database and dial direct from their PCs.
• Integration with college car park access control system to enable remote operation of barriers and intercom.

“Using ShoreTel’s browser-based ShoreTel Director, the system is extremely easy to manage — probably the easiest of all the products we looked at.”
— Gareth Burton, IT Manager, Coleg Glan Hafren.