My name is Jim Homouda and I’m the IT manager at Al Amanah College and I also manage Salami College in Chester hill and Glenroy Private in Melbourne. We have four campuses in total and additional to the campuses are a couple of small offices that are affiliated with us and which are also wholly managed by me and a small team. We were facing a number of issues with our old system, number one: is cost, it was a system that was initially purchased somewhere around six or seven years ago, even at the time that it was purchased, it was a cheaper system and it was really only put in place as a Band-Aid solution. However we found that there were there was a lot of functionality that we were looking for that was essentially missing. For example we wanted to be able to call across the different sites just by picking up the phone and dialing an extension, that wasn’t a possibility. Outside of that obviously cost was expensive, we were missing things like call attendants and direct in-dial and essentially a whole range of things that you would see now available in a modern system, unfortunately was not available in that older system.

One of the other issues that we faced there was actually quite a big problem for us is, we were, we started off a relatively small organization that grew quite exponentially and we found that with the old system, every time we wanted to connect a new telephone we had to physically run a new cable from the phone system itself to whatever office or whatever location that phone was going to. With obviously this new cloud-based solution essentially all of the data is being sent over the internet, so all we ever have to do is connect a network cable to that location plug the phone in and off you go.

We found there were many benefits to our business by implementing cloud phones hosted solution. Number one of course is the cost, so we were paying for quite a number of phone lines having four campuses and a couple of additional offices as well. We were paying one provider for somewhere in excess of 30 phone lines a month and we were able to essentially get rid of them altogether and obviously there’s a huge cost-benefit to that, you know paying $30 a month per line or $35 it does add up at the end of the month. Outside of that we do have a number of users who were mobile users, always floating around between different offices, me being one of them and what we were able to do is essentially install an application on our users phones to allow them to make calls as if they were actually sitting in their office and the other benefit is they were able to receive calls as if they were sitting in their offices. So it was quite good for us in terms of being able to track down people that we needed to track down and others were able to get ahold of those people we found that were sometimes, you know, difficult to catch, they were floating around because they tend to have roles outside of a single site within our business.

Additional to that, we have obviously a number of users who are using desktops and laptops and they were able to essentially have some integration between their phones and their computers with Outlook and other mail clients to allow them to look up phone numbers of different people, click a button and it would send a call directly to their phone and it would also work with vice versa. So outside of cost our other biggest benefit was the ability for our staff members to collaborate with each other. Unfortunately, previously our staff members would sometimes avoid making phone calls because they would have to call through to reception and then they’d have to be transferred or they’d have to call somebody’s mobile phone. Now because our staff members essentially have the ability to pick up the phone and dial an extension and speak directly to the person they want to speak to, we found that they are using things like email and instant messenger less, which sometimes takes time for a response to come through. Picking up the phone and getting an answer to whatever question or whatever problem they have resolved essentially instantaneously.

In terms of our employees’ acceptance of the new phones and the new telephone system as a whole, we found that they were quite receptive to it. So initially they were actually quite excited to see a new phone on the desk, it was nice, it was black and it was shiny and smell good. It came out of a box brand-new and then they sat down and they started to use the functionality that was actually available in the telephones. So we opted to go with the Cisco system which we found that employees were very, very receptive of. They were excited to see you know Cisco at the top of their phones, they knew it was a recognized brand, they’d seen it all around the school in other technologies that we’ve implemented and they found that the phones themselves were actually quite easy to use. They were able to, you know, click on different buttons to access their voicemail or organize or have their voicemail sent directly to their email, able to transfer calls just by pressing one button essentially and they were able to switch their phones off when they were busy or they were in a meeting and they didn’t want to be disturbed by it. So all in all most of our employees and in fact I can quite comfortably say all of our employees are really quite pleased with the new phone system and with the new phones themselves.