Mitel wins Mowbray College UC deal

Mowbray College has three campuses on the western edge of metropolitan Melbourne, and a fourth campus located near Shanghai in China.

There are approximately 1,500 students enrolled across its regional campuses, with a total of 200 teachers and administration staff.

It runs its IT operations from this campus as well.

Teaching facilities are spread across the campuses and some subjects are only offered at a single facility, meaning some students travel via bus between the two.

Daryl English head of ICT Services for Mowbray College said its previous phone system used to have a PABX at each site with simple call handling.

Few staff had their own phone extensions, so calls were routed to areas rather than people.

"This led to significant staff time being spent manually picking up calls and taking messages," he said.

"In addition, the system was expensive to run and expensive to support across our multi-campus environment.

"We went through a formal tender process and found that Mitel's solution offered us the ability to significantly reduce our costs, while giving us the flexibility to easily grow our system in the future."

A single Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) located at the Melton campus was chosen to handle all voice communications across the Australian campuses, replacing three traditional PABX systems.

Servers and applications were upgraded, and moved to a managed co-location facility, linked to the campuses via a high speed fibre network.

The Mitel IP communications solution incorporates Mitel Live Business Gateway and Mitel IP phones for teachers and administrators.

Live Business Gateway integrates the Mitel solution with both Microsoft Office Communicator and Active Directory.

The Microsoft Office Communicator softphone has been deployed for some users, allowing them to make phone calls directly from their computer to any Mitel phone handset, as well as make calls to external phone numbers.

The entire IT infrastructure solution was designed and implemented by Icomm, a Melbourne based Mitel PremierPARTNER.

Icomm will provide ongoing remote management and support for the entire data and voice infrastructure, as well as for servers and equipment at the co-location facility.

Gwilym Funnell, vice president APAC for Mitel said many organisations are looking for effective ways to improve employee productivity while getting more from their IT budget.

"We offer easy integration with Microsoft applications and active directory, so customers can get the most from their existing investments in software applications," he said.