IP phone unified communications benefits foreshore authority

The waterfront from Darling Harbour to The Rocks, one of Australia’s iconic tourist centres, is managed by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA). Voice communications, both internally among the Authority’s four locations, and externally with business contacts and tourists all over the world, is critical to the SHFA’s operations.

Running its telephony service from a TDM PBX was once the only option for the group, but as internet protocol (IP) and SIP began to emerge, IT executives found it impossible to ‘back in’ IP functionality to an outdated PBX, so they turned to an all-IP environment and the Microsoft office communications server (OCS) 2007 R2. The reason: an OCS platform would give the organisation an advanced IP telephony feature set, including unified messaging, conferencing standard call features, in a well-known Microsoft environment.

Like many organisations, the SHFA had a diverse cross-section of end users to answer to but the common thread was that people wanted to keep the tradition of a desktop phone while also being able to enjoy productivity-enhancing benefits of Microsoft OCS.

SHFA IT Manager Matt Marlor examined several different kinds of phones, looking at functionality, usability and price. Specifically, because he wanted to maintain an IP PBX as a backup system, he needed phones that could run on both systems simultaneously. In the end, the snom 370 from Alloy made the cut.

“The snom phones really blew us away immediately,” said Marlor. “And the key was that they could run perfectly on Microsoft OCS, but if anything went wrong, they were also capable of running the fallback system (the NET VX1200 Voice Exchange for Unified Communications).”

While the snom phones at SHFA were immediately operational on OCS, Marlor also wanted a custom management system which would control elements such as provisioning, firmware upgrades and phone certification, and which would be user friendly not only for the IT team, but for the end users as well. Marlor used the information on the snom wiki and was able to build a management system the adoption of which, between development, testing and full roll out, took about six months.

In the end, the SHFA deployed more than 300 snom endpoints, including snom 320s, snom 370s and the snom PA1 SIP public address system across its OCS environment. Some of the immediate benefits included: easy provisioning of new lines, from central site or across branch locations and interoperable fail over from OCS to other environments