Case Study Hill House School

Overview

Hill House School is a co-educational independent school for pupils from the ages of 3 to 18 in South Yorkshire, England. The school already engaged the services of Connectus to ensure the best possible connectivity for its pupils and staff, Cyber support and remote hosting services.  An ageing telephony platform, proposed stop of ISDN services and looking at how communications and its office systems could be integrated to provide efficient and effective management and control of processes and procedures was the next phase of its continued service improvement program.

Hill House were running a traditional onsite PBX supported by ISDN services. The current solution was restrictive in terms of allowing the school to manage call traffic efficiently, ongoing maintenance of the legacy PBX platform was a growing concern and they needed to move away from BT ISDN.

The school needed to ensure that the chosen VoIP solution helped not only to improve efficiency in operational activities but also operating costs.

As a school, communications are critical, so which ever solution was chosen, the window to migrate the services had to be carefully planned around school holidays so that all tasks within the project could be completed with minimum disruption.

The final driver was to work with Connectus on integration with their iSAMS system to support their Safeguarding policy and improve staff communications by providing relevant data on screen against inbound calls.

The Hill House and Connectus relationship has been proven over many years through the supply of full-fibre broadband, secure housing of off-site backup storage, provision of dark-fibre services.

Connectus submitted a proposal to migrate the current PBX services to our Xelion VoIP solution.  Presenting the proposal to key stakeholders, the school was able to quickly identify the many features on the platform that would enable them to improve both internal and external communications using fixed handsets, softphone and mobile applications.  As a full SIP solution, this also would remove the ISDN services and contribute to the overall cost-benefits of the project.

Once migration was complete, integration options between the VoIP platform and iSAMS were discussed and a presentation with our partner Redcactus demonstrated the full benefits of using the inbound CLI of the caller to build a query against the iSAMS database for relevant data and how this supports the Safeguarding policies of the school.

A trial was setup and scripts developed to interrogate the SQL database.  Licences were provided during the trial to Administration staff and using feedback, the information retrieval and how it was displayed on the screens was crafted into a final template.

The telephony solution we provided has dramatically improved their communications, saved them money, increased their resilience and improved child safety. The office staff are able to confidently and securely identify callers, and their associated pupils and have urgent relevant messages displayed on their screens. The result is a safer and more professional service.