With 700 staff working from 19 different premises, Adelaide City Council wanted to improve its internal communications, making it easier for staff to collaborate and reducing the need to travel between offices.
As the traditional PABX phone system neared retirement, Council’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) staff decided to trial a network-based telephony solution — Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Enterprise Edition.
The trial was so successful that Council made the deployment of Lync throughout the organisation a top priority for 2012.
Council’s ICT Infrastructure and Operations Team Leader, David Carroll said, “Our Council has an ‘anytime, anywhere’ strategy that aims to give all staff the ability to manage council business wherever they are, and whenever they need to work.
“To help deliver on this strategy, we wanted to reduce the number of trips staff made between Council offices and the Town Hall. I wanted to be able to give staff a full-blown, media-rich meeting experience at their desktop.”
During a ten-week deployment process, Mr Carroll and his ICT Team extended Lync to all 700 Council staff, integrating it with the existing email service, Microsoft Exchange 2010, which enabled staff to receive voicemail messages via email and see colleagues’ availability within an email message or calendar invite.
Lync also allows staff to create instant group Lync meetings (with audio, video and collaboration functionality) from wherever they are, via laptop, desktop or from their mobile devices.
By mid-2012, Adelaide City Council had become the first major metropolitan council in Australia to replace its PABX phone system with Lync desktop telephony.
As a result of the new system staff are more productive because they travel less, telephony maintenance and support costs have fallen by 75 percent, and a single ICT Team provides all technical and telephony support.
More importantly perhaps, communication between Council staff and offices has become more efficient and effective, improving the organisation’s overall performance.
