Marcom Voice and Data Communications

Worth School is set in 500 acres of rolling Sussex countryside. It is a Roman Catholic co-educational boarding and day school for 11-18 year olds, under the guidance and care of the Benedictine monks of the adjacent Worth Abbey who work closely with the Head Master and lay staff.

Challenge:

The school’s communications system, an Avaya Index, was obsolete and maintenance was becoming difficult. Similarly, the school’s third party Global pc based voicemail solution had been obsolete for several years. Although an option based upon adding a gateway to the Index system, to allow a phased migration, had been suggested to the school, it would have meant that many of the handsets would still be connected to the Index system, putting them at risk if a non-replaceable processor were to fail. An additional restriction was that over the years the site had accrued a mix of cabling infrastructure.

Solution:

Marcom proposed the installation of a new Siemens HiPath 3800 telephone system to improve both the present communications service and to look for future growth. 

With the client constantly needing to upgrade and standardise cabling, to enable the move towards IP - in order, for example, to allow phones access to data -  it was essential that Marcom’s cabling engineers and projects team liaised closely with the school’s facilities team. Similarly voicemail to email, in which voicemail messages could be attached to email messages, would bring modern voicemail advantages throughout the site.

Results:

The HiPath 3800 provided has enabled Marcom to ‘future proof’ Worth’s communications to a large extent. This will become increasingly relevant as the continuing cabling updates are rolled out. An example of additional benefits has been the allocation of phantom mailboxes, enabling staff without a fixed phone to have access to voicemail.

Both Marcom and Worth appreciated that this was a big project for the school. The client was impressed with Marcom’s handling of the installation process. As Tony Ross, Worth School’s Facilities Manager explained “The changeover to the new system was programmed to occur out of term time and that is precisely what happened. A number of training sessions on the new system took place at that time, followed by additional training once the system was fully in use when pupils were back with us. The whole process went to plan and was an extremely smooth transition. We were pleased that we had contracted this work to a professional organisation and one that could give us confidence in their expertise and solution”.

The school’s communication system is now maintained by Marcom.

visit the Worth School website