Spanning 377,000km2 in Far North Queensland, Catholic Education Diocese of Cairns (CEDC) is made up of 30 school communities attended by one in every four K-12 students in the region. CEDC schools offer quality facilities and access to contemporary teaching to facilitate life-long learning for more than 12,500 students in an ever-changing world. With 2,500 staff, CEDC is one of the region’s largest non-government employers.
CEDC has had to adapt to geographical diversity, focusing on ensuring a stable and reliable carriage service to support internet connectivity and communications, explained CEDC’s Manager Information Technology Michael Norman. “One of our big challenges is making sure that the technology experience in all of our schools is equitable, and that our staff and students in the Torres Strait have a similar experience to those based in Cairns.”
The diocese had been using a mix of traditional PABX solutions in its schools, including IP and digital systems, some of which were end-of-life and posed risks due to lack of manufacturer support. “We were finding it more and more challenging to get support, even to do basic maintenance. And there was obviously the risk that if we had a major failure on those systems, we were going to be without telephone services,” said Norman.
CEDC supports a diverse mix of technology platforms across its schools but decided to standardise on a single telephony platform driven by the need for economies of scale, ease of support and consistent service delivery across the region. The key requirements for the solution included the option for both physical handsets and softphones, high availability and reduced dependence on local points of failure, and integration with Microsoft Teams.
After undertaking a rigorous RFQ, vendor selection and product demonstration process, the
RingCentral RingEX unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform was chosen from the shortlist, based on its compliance with requirements, simplicity of administration, and cost-effectiveness. That also included the lease of 1,100 physical handsets, which ensured there was no capital expense in the rollout project, and CEDC could rely on predictable costs over the lifetime of the platform.
Working in collaboration with RingCentral Professional Services, CEDC completed a staged rollout over six months of 1,400 extensions to its central office and 28 of CEDC’s 30 schools. To ensure a smooth transition, prior to rollout the project team undertook extensive data collation, requirements validation, network tests, deployment plans and training with each school.
All the physical handsets were pre-configured by RingCentral so that there was minimal on-site work required.
“One of our more creative team members 3D printed a template for the wall mounting bracket holes, as these were different to the existing handsets. We gave these to maintenance staff to help, by having screws in place for the day of the rollout. This was a huge time saver on rollout days as it made the process a quick swap over,” said Norman.
While most of the schools deployed new handsets, CEDC central office is now 100% softphone – using either the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams embedded dialler or the RingCentral app for mobile devices – reducing complexity and overall costs. With central office planning to move into a new building that has also allowed CEDC to design more flexible working spaces for staff.
