Solving The Bedford College Group's telephony problems in less than a day

The challenge

The Bedford College Group is one of the largest post-16 college groups in the country. With eight colleges (and 23 buildings) spread throughout Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire it’s fair to say the group’s telephony requirements are complex. Making sure these needs are met hasn’t always been easy.

Session border controller allows organisations to replace traditional phone systems and handsets, using MS Teams to extend the voice over internet protocol (VoIP) to operate across the public switched telephone network (PSTN). It’s an increasingly popular solution for organisations looking to get ready for when BT switches analogue phone lines off.

The group’s digital innovation specialist, Martin Johnson, was faced with a difficult situation:

“Unfortunately, the legacy system had proved tricky to implement. We’d spent almost a year on it, and it still wasn’t fully operational when Jisc told us about their session border controller service in the spring 2023 term. We jumped at the chance to sort our issues out with a trusted partner.”

Luckily, this meant Jisc’s Microsoft 365 (M365) specialists were already working with the group when disaster struck at the busiest time of year. We’d started to plan a session border controller and Microsoft Teams for telephony configuration that would meet The Bedford College Group’s current needs and support its future aspirations.

Our session border controller service is cloud-based and fully managed. Users benefit from the power of our Janet Network and the world-class capabilities of our operating partners Oracle and Gamma, enjoying high call quality and reliability and futureproofing their telephony systems.

Fast-tracked solution

The original plan was a department by department roll out. That all changed when the phone lines went down on 21 August 2023. Suddenly, several thousand students couldn’t phone in to get their GCSE results or confirm their places, and some needed pastoral support or urgent careers advice.

Sheraz Amin, The Bedford College Group’s executive director of digital transformation, explains:

“It was tense, and we needed either to fix the old system or to implement the new one fast. We chose to move forward, not back.”

A typical rapid deployment of this size would take two to three months but when the group told us about the emergency, we rushed things through.

The Bedford College Group managed students’ immediate concerns by putting an automated message on the old phone system to explain the issues and suggest they come to site for information and help. They also deployed a chatbot on their website to help with managing online queries.

Meanwhile, we got on with getting the new system in place. Usually, we’d start by moving a couple of phone numbers over for an initial test but this time we moved about 1,000; it meant staff could handle the peak number of calls. We moved the rest (about another 2,000 phone numbers) two hours later, when it was clear the deployment was robust. Sheraz says:

“Installing an SBS solution in under 24 hours is a huge achievement. Jisc went above and beyond for us, testing deep into the night so we could support students who phoned in.”

Teamwork

Jisc’s engineers worked remotely, partnering with the group’s IT team to make sure the right IP addresses were allowed, and manage the test. Sheraz adds:

“We were communicating to and fro, with Jisc describing what we should do on site to support, what we should expect to see and how to avoid potential issues. We also worked with Gamma to make sure the lines went in without a hitch. Jisc’s solution just worked.”

Support for staff

Because we’d done some groundwork in the early summer, any staff who weren’t already confident with Teams had supporting documentation to refer to during the first few days, and The Bedford College Group offered training and refreshers for people who wanted them. Most were reasonably familiar with the app so there weren’t many headaches while getting used to the new system.

Martin Johnson said:

“In August, when we implemented session border controller, most staff were working in their usual college campus or learning centre because the results were coming out, but a large number of staff sometimes work off site and this was a strong argument for us to go for a cloud-based, managed service.

"We can integrate all our staff, wherever they are, into a single, unified communications system that’s managed for us by dedicated specialists who are freeing us up to do other things.”

Benefits

Having decommissioned the old phone system The Bedford College Group stand to save around £10,000 a year on maintenance and associated costs.

Sheraz comments:

“That’s not the main driver, though. The deployment is more about freeing IT staff from having to fix issues out of hours, and giving everyone who calls us a quality call experience and a good impression of the organisation.

“It’s also giving us time to work on innovation and new ways to add value for students, staff and the communities we work in.”

An important aspect of the session border controller service is expert advice and support to develop a solution to enable configuration changes further down the line. In the 2023/24 college year The Bedford College Group has been moving more of its telephony into the new service because it is provenly more reliable with excellent call quality