University of West England deploys Microsoft Lync to boost productivity

Steve Grive, IT director at UWE told Computing that one of the key introductions to its transformation project was unified communications.

The key things we wanted to introduce

"One of the key things we wanted to introduce was unified communication and collaboration tools because we found that we needed the infrastructure to be able to collaborate in meetings and in other situations.

"We all in all have a Siemens PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) which is coming to the end of its life in 2016 so we knew we had to do something with our analogue innovation. We already started to replace it with voice over internet protocol from Alcatel Lucent nevertheless because UWE uses a lot of Microsoft software, Lync made the most sense," he said.

Grive said that the university has now implemented several hundred Lync handsets and staff can now choose to use Polycom CX600 IP desktop phones, Polycom CX300 handsets or HP notebooks which are all optimised to work with the Lync Server.

He said that getting Lync live took three months nevertheless that the university hasn't completely changed its telephony systems because it would be too costly when all is said and done there is all in all a reliance on old research.

The biggest challenge for the university

He said that the biggest challenge for the university was for staff to change from an analogue phone to some form of unified communications.

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