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IT Services

Strategy

The IT Services Department aims to provide services and capabilities commensurate with a world leading University in order to support 'Vision 2015: A Strategy for Warwick

Telecommunication Strategic Plan.

The traditional voice infrastructure at the University has been based on the MITEL SX2000 platform with peripheral cabinets capable of supporting around 10,000 extensions. The traditional voice infrastructure will become obsolete in the medium-term and there is therefore a requirement to gradually migrate to a ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’ (VoIP) telecommunications infrastructure.

During the last 5 years, the strategy of IT Services has been for any new building to be incorporated into the telecommunications infrastructure by the addition of a VoIP network and MITEL 3300 ICP gateways. These have been used to support peripheral equipment cabinets providing digital telephones and analogue service. The existing MITEL 3300 ICP VoIP gateways now support 2,000 VoIP extension users and the strategic plan is to move the existing legacy users to VoIP telephones.

The strategic policy is to:

  • Replace the existing MITEL SX2000 controllers with MITEL 3300 ICP gateways and then progress the migration of the existing 8,000 legacy users to VoIP.
  • Commence the further development of a virtualisation strategy for MITEL server application in respect of the following:

1. MITEL 3300 ICP Gateway.

2. MITEL Nupoint Voicemail.

3. MITEL 6110/6160 ACD and announcement servers.

4. MITEL Enterprise manager

5. To converge the VoIP and Data Network using MITEL 3300 ICP Gateways and the Cisco data network.

New features that will deliver tangible business benefits include:

  • Dynamic Extension to allow extensions to be twinned with mobiles, home phones etc.
  • Hot desking using any telephone, e.g. mobiles, home phones etc.
  • New mobility options.
  • Wider choice of user devices and client applications.
  • Embedded system management.
  • Embedded simple and licence free ACD working.
  • Improvements to Licensing.
  • Improvements to resilience options.

 

 

Unified Communication (UC) and Unified messaging (UM).

Unified communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, IP telephony and video conferencing.

Unified messaging (UM) is the integration of different none-real-time electronic messaging (e-mail, SMS, Fax, voicemail etc.) technologies into a single interface, accessible from a variety of different devices.

The strategy will be to run pilot schemes to evaluate Microsoft and MITEL UC and UM product sets (dates are yet to be confirmed) in order to assess the business case for their implementation at Warwick.

Mobile Telephony.

The University mobile contract is with Vodafone corporate, who supply mobile phones and provide a mobile virtual private network called ‘Warwick Mobilenet’. The University mobile strategy is still under review and will be driven by the future technology developments of the mobile companies, such as Vodafone.