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City of Langford enjoys more collaboration features and offers improved customer service, while achieving significant cost savings.

CASE STUDY

City of Langford, a young city incorporated in December 1992, has been the fastest growing municipality in British Columbia for over a decade. Between their two main sites, the City Hall and the Fire Hall, they have roughly 90 employees. As a small and agile city, with a visionary mayor, they wanted to leverage technology as much as possible to reduce costs as well as increase staff efficiency and collaboration to ultimately improve customer service.

City of Langford was an early adopter of Unified Communications (UC) messaging solutions from Microsoft and had been following the Lync product from infancy, starting with Exchange Instant Messaging. They relied heavily on presence information and when they approached ThinkTel, they were using Nortel’s Converged Office with Microsoft’s OCS 2007 R2 and a CS1000 Call Server to meet UC chat and voice requirements.

City of Langford was looking to perform an upgrade from Exchange 2007 to 2010 and in order to maintain, upgrade and integrate everything, they were looking at a complex proposal with a high level of investment amounting to $60,000-$70,000. This upgrade prompted them to review their UC solution and look at the option of discarding CS1000 and using voice-enabled Microsoft Lync as a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) replacement.

It was significantly cheaper to discard CS1000 and use ThinkTel to deploy Microsoft Lync with new phones. This Lync and SIP Trunk solution has allowed our staff to be more efficient and provide better service to our customers. We are now saving money by taking advantage of more collaboration features, as well as greater flexibility, insight and control, which is truly remarkable.

Mike PalmerManagerInformation Technology DepartmentCity of Langford

Our Professional Services and SIP Trunking solution has allowed City of Langford to benefit from Microsoft Lync’s rich feature set, including Enterprise Voice. SIP Trunking is the perfect solution for businesses with 5 to 25 lines operating across multiple locations or experiencing highly-variable call volumes. Our business model, which offers advanced reporting and Capacity on Demand, has allowed them to realize these benefits, while significantly reducing day to day operational costs.

Mike WoodDirector of Professional ServicesThinkTel

We were using the complete Microsoft office suite, including Outlook, SharePoint and Exchange. Their seamless integration and Lync’s rich feature set was a good argument to move over our legacy PBX to Microsoft Lync.

Mike Palmer, Manager, Information Technology Department at City of Langford said:

Mike Palmer said:

We are now getting more features and paying less. Primary Rate Interface (PRI) with long distance used to cost us $800 per month and now we’re definitely under $400.

With Microsoft Lync, the initial investment dropped by nearly 50 percent and also presented significant daily operational cost savings of over 50 percent.

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The solution was delivered in two-tiered approach, starting with the City Hall in a first phase and moving on to the Fire Hall in a second phase. The additional Lync front end server for the Fire Hall gave City of Langford a whole new level of redundancy. Previously the Fire Hall was its own. Now they have the ability to survive outages on either side; if one server fails, everyone fails over to the other one and if one SIP Trunk goes down, they have redundant call paths. City of Langford has also opted for AudioCodes' Analog Media Gateway to ensure that if bad weather causes their internet to go down, they can make use of ThinkTel’s exclusive failover system; Surecall.

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Mike Palmer said:

I liked ThinkTel’s approach. During deployment, they kept our PRIs. They did everything to ensure we were confident and that we would have a smooth and successful transition to Lync. He added: Previously we used PRI for inbound calls and SIP Trunk for outgoing calls. Now we have ported the numbers for inbound and we have the ability to send all traffic on SIP Trunk and our end users haven’t noticed the difference.

City of Langford now benefits from the productivity and efficiency gains available through Microsoft Lync’s rich feature set including Instant Messaging (IM), presence, audio and video conferencing, as well as Voice over IP (VoIP).

From an end user perspective, there was no learning curve for City Hall workers and the upgrade went unnoticed. As for the Fire Hall, firefighters can now take advantages of a multitude of new collaboration features that they never had before. They all have the Lync client on their smartphones and each have their own DID. Firefighters are particularly impressed with Simultaneous Ring (SimRing), which allows them to have multiple destinations ring simultaneously when any calls are received on a phone number.

City of Langford now enjoys more features and flexibility at a lower cost. Additionally, the solution helps the administration of the organization, which has been split between the two main sites. They have the ability to take calls from the Fire Hall at the City Hall and can use the Attendant Console to see who is available, embracing presence for call routing. This flexibility has also allowed City of Langford to offer a better service to their customers.

ThinkTel provided a complete range of services to enable Lync with Enterprise Voice including planning, deployment, user training, set-up, configuration, migration of the users from CS1000 to the new environment and SIP Trunking. SIP Trunking for Lync is impor-tant because it activates Enterprise Voice and allows City of Langford to eliminate potential points of failure by establishing a direct SIP connection with their mediation server.

Mike Palmer concluded:

Working with ThinkTel was excellent. I felt comfortable with their level of knowledge and expertise and they were very easy to work with. I like their approach, which is friendly, quick to react and much more agile with a more personalized service than I’ve experienced with larger companies before.

Enables Lync's PSTN dialing and in-house multimedia conferencing capabilities.

Offers a streamlined SIP trunk network configuration with aggregate capacity across multiple sites.

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Reduces costs associated with Capacity on Demand and in-network calling features. Previously City of Langford had to pay a fixed PRI with 23 channels. Today, they only pay for what they use; they started with ten channels and trimmed down to seven based on their usage report. In the summer, they expect to bump it up to meet their requirements. This flexibility has allowed them to cut down their phone bill by more than 50 percent.

Provides scalable, dynamic and flexible software, enabling organizations to manage users and changes to their network without having to request permission; saving time and money.

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Includes an advanced management portal with real-time Direct Inbound Dial (DID) provisioning and reporting capabilities. Previously, City of Langford had to purchase weekly traffics studies that included peak channels and basic recommendations at a cost of $300 per report. ThinkTel’s reporting services offers a much more granular view on the usage, including the ability to drill down and see who is answering calls as well as who is receiving them. Best of all, it’s a free, real-time (updated every four hours), self-serve service offered through ThinkTel’s UControl portal.

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ThinkTel’s SIP Trunking solution also offers the following benefits:

Mike Palmer said:

I was looking for both a Lync Professional Services and SIP Trunking provider. ThinkTel could provide the whole package at a competitive rate. He added: I looked at other SIP Trunking providers and they all have multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) based network infrastructures, run on a dedicated environment and do not offer bursting, thus basically offering standard PRI. ThinkTel’s SIP Trunking offering is much more interesting and they are also the only Canadian company certified by Microsoft for SIP Trunking to Lync, so choosing them was a relatively easy choice.

City of Langford chose to work with ThinkTel to provide both Lync Professional Services and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking for both their City Hall and Fire Hall.

From the back end perspective, this has been completely transformed and is now virtualized, running on Hyper V and decoupled from the hardware. ThinkTel’s SIP Trunking solution has allowed them to get rid of PRIs and ThinkTel’s Capacity on Demand allows City of Langford to review a detailed usage report and only pay for what they are using, without having to overcommit.