[Title] Taking telephony to the cloud. Integrating calls through teams.
AMANDA HENDERSON (Manager Systems and Information, Tablelands Regional Council, QLD): We’re located up on the Atherton Tablelands. It’s a beautiful area filled with rainforests and lots of hills and agricultural industry. We have approximately 11,400 square kilometres of area that we cover and obviously across that area that requires a lot of remote working and associated with that is connectivity challenges.
So our phone system was becoming end of life, it was out of date and we were starting to see business disruption with failing hardware. Because it was a single point of failure for us it was causing challenges if we did have issues with our hardware, we actually lost complete phone services across our council.
JIMMY BOSANQUET (ICT System Engineer, Tablelands Regional Council, QLD): To mitigate this risk, we engaged Telstra Enterprise partner, RMT and Telstra as our partner to move to Telstra Operator Connect and to utilise the Microsoft Teams platform. So basically what the Operator Connect platform has provided us with is a cloud based model which handles all our call routing in the digital world. This almost removes the reliance on any sort of office space itself. From a technological point of view we've moved to a much more secure and simplified space.
JENNI: So the other thing that the Teams platform being fully cloud has enabled us to do is mobilise wherever we need to to actually set up to manage a disaster. We are a cyclone prone area and it is something that we actively prepare for and practise for on an annual basis. With Microsoft Teams, we can now basically pick up our staff, give them devices and set them up anywhere that we have an internet connection.
5G has added to the capabilities of the staff working remotely. They are seeing greater speeds in the field, which enables them to go about undertaking their day to day jobs, their processing on their iPads. Loading data into their systems via their mobile devices has been a lot more efficient since we’ve had the 5G connectivity in the area.
So we’ve been a Telstra customer for quite some time. And so for us it was a very simple decision. As a council, we have further plans to have more and more staff working out in the field, being able to deliver their services and their functions remotely and utilising the Teams platform will provide us that greater capacity.
