Charles Sturt signs up for unified comms

Charles Sturt University has signed Interactive Intelligence to deploy unified communications across the university’s multiple campuses.

The university currently employs an aging PABX platform, which has proved difficult to maintain and has been unable to scale with the university’s changing communications requirements.

The new system is a single software platform incorporating an IP PBX application suite and multimedia contact centre, built for VoIP and SIP. Accompanying the platform will be a set of Polycom IP handsets.

Phil Roy, Charles Sturt’s Director Operations Division of IT, says the system was chosen for its architecture, ease of maintenance and scalability.

“We look forward to taking advantage of the system’s presence and mobility capabilities to better service our community,” Roy says.

The university will roll out the IP telephony system to its student residential accommodation, in addition to the campuses. This will cover about 600 student accommodation units being built in Wagga Wagga, Thurgoona and Bathurst. It will also be deployed for the university’s new dentistry school.

The IP telephony server comes preloaded with a software package that contains all of the telecommunications applications that the university may choose to deploy in the future. In addition to unified communications, these include IP PBX, presence management, multi-media contact centre, outbound dialler, auto attendant, IVR, fax server, voice and screen recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, workflow management, self-service, voice recognition and mobile applications.

Each campus location will be equipped with a media server that will provide the local processing power to remove load from the main communications server. In addition, the solution is equipped with a SIP proxy business continuity application that can take local control of IP handsets and gateways if the main and redundant servers or the WAN fail.

Implementation has commenced and is expected to be fully complete by the end of 2009. Upon completion, the university will decommission the old PABX system.

Roy says the system will improve the way the university does business.

“We will be able to develop new business processes applying new phone, email, web chat and instant messaging applications regardless of the location of the staff member or student. We’ll not only be able to automatically route calls to staff wherever they may be, but we’ll be able to track these interactions so we can more effectively operate as a seamless organisation.”

The university will also consider potential contact centre applications of the system.