The Royal Agricultural Society of England

Since 1840, the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) has helped support farming and the rural industries by spreading information about the best in research, development, and practice. Today its work includes support for business and social welfare in rural communities, education, and a wide portfolio of shows and events. Ensuring that the right information is shared with those who need it, and that events are efficiently managed, depends on reliable and effective communications.

“Our employees love the new system. Despite the varying levels of IT literacy, they have all embraced ShoreTel technology due to its ease of use.”
— Stewart Page, Assistant Director of ICT, Royal Agricultural Society of England.

RASE’s old, digital Philips telephony system was rapidly approaching its end of life, and required an increasing amount of technical expertise for routine tasks, such as moving around phone lines and adding users. The society also was planning to relocate, and needed a new system in place when moving to the new offices. Migration to unified communications was viewed as a long-term communications strategy.

“The project management team guided deployment smoothly through to completion within the time frame planned. We had to make the transition over one weekend and the switch to the new system worked excellently thanks to our team effort with ShoreTel and Voyager Networks.”
— Stewart Page, Assistant Director of ICT, Royal Agricultural Society of England.

Voyager Networks, a ShoreTel partner, was brought on to design the solution to be deployed across four locations at RASE’s 250-acre Stoneleigh Park. Because of the rural location, RASE also needed analogue functionality for extensions to remote areas around the site. The 230-user ShoreTel deployment at RASE includes ShoreTel Voice Switches models E1k, 120, and 90, and a Dell PowerEdge R200 server. RASE also deployed ShoreTel IP Phones, and now use the full suite of ShoreTel Call Manager applications, depending on the communication requirements of each user’s role. Benefits include:

• Ease of deployment and use resulted in timely and efficient implementation and employee training.
• Open, distributed architecture and plug-and-play scalability enable IT staff to manage the system remotely from anywhere on the network.
• Switchboard operators can respond to many inquiries independently and without external support.
• ShoreTel Call Manager helps improve service by ensuring missed calls are monitored and returned.
• The time to deploy a new extension has been reduced by 75 percent, and it now takes only 10 minutes to install a new line for exhibitors.

“By eliminating the old system, we’ve taken back a whole equipment room, thus saving on space and cooling costs.”
— Stewart Page, Assistant Director of ICT, Royal Agricultural Society of England.