After 23 years of service, City University’s telephone system has been retired. Taking its place is a new system that offers us a range of possibilities for developing the ways in which we use our telephones in the future….including not having telephones at all!
What are the immediate benefits of the new system?
* Operating on the university’s Local Area Network (LAN), the system has a greater capacity, making it more able to handle peaks in usage, such as during clearing. It also allows us to benefit from the resilience of the LAN while allowing us to decommission the private network used by the old system.
* It is more environmentally friendly, allowing us to reduce our carbon footprint. This is because the new gateways use only around 10% of the power used by the old system, and they produce less heat, thus reducing the power consumption of the cooling systems.
* The new system runs on a virtual server, and has a built in failsafe in the event of a technical issue; this helps to ensure there is never a major outage. In addition to this, we have also arranged 24/7 support meaning that any problems are automatically reported and immediately attended to by the maintainer.
* The Calling Line Identity service is now available on all phones throughout the University. This means that when someone calls your landline from another University landline, the system will be able to tell you who is calling.
Although many users may not notice an immediate difference, this upgrade enables us to start introducing new services over the coming months. For example, as work continues on a more fully integrated network, this will enable connectivity to various University systems such as Office 365 and Lync.
Looking to the future….
An exciting feature planned for the future is presence information. This allows users to view a contact’s availability, letting them know if the contact is on a call or diverted. This feature has already been rolled out to the switchboard team, who are using it to more effectively direct calls. Working in a similar way to presence awareness on Lync, you will be able to see someone’s status based on their computer activity and calendar items.
We will also be able to start moving away from physical telephones, in favour of virtual PC based phones. As well as saving a little space on your desk, a virtual phone system could be more effectively integrated into other PC-based applications. For example, users could have the ability to share documents and screens over the phone, making collaboration and support easier and more effective.
While the new system may not be dissimilar from the old in appearance, the infrastructure behind it is a more modern, effective design. Various improvements and features planned for the future would not be possible without the upgraded system. Thanks to the efforts of the Telecoms team we can look forward to many exciting developments in the future.
