Sheffield City Council
Making the switch from on-premises to a cloud telephony solution
Sheffield City Council provides services to a population of nearly 600,000 in South Yorkshire. The City of Sheffield is divided across 28 electoral wards and is England’s third largest district authority.
Services
Microsoft Teams Telephony Migration
The Brief
Sheffield City Council had an aging telephone system, and with the existing contract coming to an end, a solution was required to upgrade the system. With over 7,500 users located in over 100 offices across the city centre, they needed a solution that could handle the scale of the project without impacting day-to-day operations. The upcoming end-of-contract also meant a hard deadline was in place for completion.
Sheffield were utilising a hosted Avaya solution who also provided PSTN connectivity via 300 ISDN connections.
Discovery workshops were run to understand the existing environment and determine the best solution. The outcome being that the existing Avaya solution should be migrated to Microsoft Teams Telephony.
The Benefits
The project was delivered on time and by migrating to Teams Telephony, Sheffield is now benefiting from:
- Increased resilience – A cloud first strategy delivers scalable and resilient solutions that ensure business continuity
- Reduction in spend - By leveraging existing Teams licensing and retiring legacy hardware, ongoing investment is no longer needed
- Minimum maintenance - Microsoft cloud telephony provides an evergreen solution that does not require continual support and software upgrades
- Unified communications – By integrating all tools in a single place; video and audio call, chat function, file sharing, schedule meetings, it provides a seamless experience for users
- Increased flexibility - A ‘work from anywhere’ capability means remote or disparate working is possible across the organisation
The Solution
A Teams Telephony platform and migration strategy in conjunction with Microsoft Phone System and Direct Routing was delivered to allow calls to and from the existing PSTN network.
By utilising their existing Teams licence, Sheffield could maximise their investment and move fully to a cloud solution.
A collaborative approach with existing provider would be needed, as Direct Routing would require the provider to establish SIP Trunks from the existing PBX to the hosted SBC’s, and also directly from the carrier to the Direct Routing solution. This would allow a phased migration of users (and DDI’s) from the previous solution to Microsoft Teams and would allow the carrier to migrate numbers down to DDI level.
A pilot phase was undertaken at Head Office and then rolled out to a further five offices to test services, safeguarding any potential issues ahead of the migration deadline.
To ensure Sheffield were supported, Nasstar supplied a service component, providing service desk to service desk support for Sheffield’s in-house support team. This provided access to the knowledge and expertise of Nasstar's Microsoft Teams specialists to help resolve and prevent the recurrence of issues relating to its Teams deployment.
We needed to upgrade our telephone system to meet the demands of customers and the modern workplace. Nasstar worked collaboratively with us to deliver a cloud-first strategy that provided us with resilience, flexibility, and value for money.