Trafford College

Trafford College was formed in September 2007 following the merger of North and South Trafford Colleges, and has approximately 9,500 students at four sites in the Greater Manchester area. With such a large student body, and facilities spread among multiple locations, effective communications are essential for providing leading educational services.

“Our staff must be able to work effectively across the various college locations. But it was impossible for users to hot-desk at the different sites because it was too difficult and time-consuming to constantly add and remove someone from the different phone systems.”
- Suzanne Bolton, Head of Telecommunications, Trafford College.

After the merger of the North and South Trafford Colleges, the college realized that its disparate combination of analogue and digital phone systems would not meet the requirements of a multi-site organisation. All calls to the college were routed via the PSTN by the two different providers that had served the former colleges, all on a cost-per-call basis. With two sets of bills, it was difficult to track the costs as calls could not be logged and all cross-site calls were chargeable. Even more, as the two main sites operated on totally different ISDN circuits, it was impossible to transfer calls between sites. 

“We were particularly pleased with the modular architecture of the ShoreTel solution, which enables us to manage the entire telephone system ourselves.”
- Suzanne Bolton, Head of Telecommunications, Trafford College.

Following a network assessment to determine whether the college’s existing network could support the ShoreTel Unified Communications (UC) system, Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches were installed to help carry the power load. In just two weeks, ShoreTel rolled out its high-powered UC system, consisting of 10 ShoreTel Voice Switches and a total of 460 ShoreTel 560, 230, 265, and 110 telephones to support over 700 users. All of the college’s voice applications, including voicemail and automated attendant, run on a standard server on its network. Benefits include:

• Consolidating all four sites into a single system has saved on calls between sites and increased productivity by making it easier for colleagues to reach each other.
• The college is using ShoreTel’s Workgroup capabilities to set up work groups with agents to handle course enquiries from students, and to book appointments at the college’s salons.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^® allows the college’s staff to retrieve numbers from their address books, and to have integrated messaging, calendar integration, and voicemail delivered to their inboxes.
• The open, distributed system makes it easy to relocate existing switches for redeployment at another site for migrating users, and to provision new switches to accommodate any future increase in additional users.
• The replacing of 460 extensions included the adding new productivity-enhancing functionalities to each, including unified messaging (voice and CTI) and automated call distribution (ACD).

“We are very pleased with the ShoreTel solution. We have reduced our operational costs across our sites.”
- Suzanne Bolton, Head of Telecommunications, Trafford College.