Seamless transition to a unified, multi-site telephony system
North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College's (NWSLC) legacy SIP-based cloud telephony system wasn’t giving people the flexibility they needed, so they called Jisc.
North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College (NWSLC) is a growing organisation with seven campuses and another opening in 2026.
“Telephony systems underpin day-to-day working at a multi-site college like ours, but we were paying a lot for one with little functionality and no way to customise it. If we needed even small changes we had to call the provider and they took a long time to respond.”
– Ridwan Khalifa, IT Services support team manager, North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College (NWSLC)
Support and planning
Because the college is a long-term Microsoft Teams user, Teams Phone looked like the obvious choice for a cloud-based, secure replacement. After listening to a talk at our 2024 Networkshop, Ridwan contacted us to discuss it and we offered a two-week trial using our session border controller service with the college’s existing Microsoft Teams tenant to break their VoIP calls onto the public switched telephone network.
When a college opts for a trial we provide it with a few free phone numbers for the duration, and the college bought 20 additional ones, costing less than a pound each. It allowed the IT Services team to plan for their Teams Phone test and scope out a tailor-made implementation without disrupting college business.
A competitive tendering process followed the test, and we’re happy to say we won that for price, quality and our support model.
Seamless migration
The project integrated NWSLC’s Microsoft Teams environment, supported by SIP trunks from our operating partner Gamma, together with our carrier-class Oracle session border controllers hosted from our own secure data centres. The college’s IT staff did most of the configuration in Teams while we planned carefully for the migration.
Once all the required technical configuration and the Oracle session border controller set-up was done, we worked with NWSLC on a test plan to ensure technical aspects were signed off. We also provided a comprehensive project plan to support migration, ready for our specialist team of voice solution engineers to work with the college on a full implementation in the autumn half-term break.
“It went like a dream. Jisc’s support and communication throughout the process could not be faulted. During the migration it became clear that our previous provider didn’t know how they had routed some of our numbers, so when a key number went down it could have held things up, but Jisc has a great relationship with its operating partners so they could get to the bottom of the issue and sort it fast. We planned for our ‘golden’ 0330 number to move last, and when it happened it was so smooth no one noticed.”
– Ridwan Khalifa, IT Services support team manager, North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College (NWSLC)
We think it’s important to keep an eye on how an implementation is working in practice, so once we’d finished work, we kept monitoring the solution in real time. Happily, there were no problems.
Benefits
Staff feedback is 97% positive. They like being able to manage their own call queues, interactive voice response (IVRs), holiday messages and more. In the next few months, they’ll have even more flexibility, as the college rolls out plans to allow staff teams to create their own call groups and group IVRs.
What’s more, NWSLC has been able to scale up ahead of need, with more SIP channels thanks to the cost savings it has made. These are significant and the college has reinvested them to pay for the full Teams Phone system and a full Microsoft Education A5 (advanced) licence for every staff member. This is an upgrade on their previous A3 licences and adds enhanced security capabilities, analytics and other useful features.
That still leaves a saving of 10-15% over the cost of the outdated telephony system.
Hints and tips
Interested in modernising your organisation’s phone system and saving money with Microsoft Teams Phone? Here are Ridwan’s tips to help:
- Take advantage of our free session border controller trial to make sure a new system can do what you need and reassure senior managers that you’re on the right path
- Consider investing in a few phone extra numbers if it will help you get the most from the session border controller trial. They cost pennies and you can keep them long-term
- Pilot real call flows (for example, the IT helpdesk) before full migration
- Plan legacy number routing carefully and don’t be afraid to challenge assumptions held by incumbent suppliers
Like to know more about the session border controller service and how we can help with your telephony upgrade?