Microsoft Teams Direct Routing Implementation Services Help Faculty of a Health Sciences University Seamlessly Communicate and Collaborate With Each Other

Business Need

The university wanted to implement an easy and reliable cloud platform that offered full support for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars. It wanted the modern team collaboration platform to allow staff to communicate with each other in real-time.

To drive better business productivity and automation, the university approached Synoptek to build a robust real-time communication environment, so all communication between staff and students could happen in a seamless and efficient manner. As part of the engagement, the university wanted to:

• Move the on-premises phone platform into an online environment
• Have the potential to integrate their communication platform with their Learning Management System
• Redesign the entire phone tree including auto-attendant and call queues
• Enable SSO to ensure seamless login for students and faculty alike

As the pandemic struck, the university had to quickly shut down the campus and set up a robust communications infrastructure that could support distance learning, so the student community could attend classes online as well as collaborate with faculty in real-time. The university embraced a popular enterprise video communication solution that offered an easy, reliable cloud platform – with support for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars.

But since this new tool supported only 100 concurrent users, the university quickly realized the need to move to a modern team collaboration platform, that could allow staff to communicate with each other in real-time.

Solution and Approach

Given how rapidly the demands of the university had to be met, Synoptek suggested implementing Microsoft Teams Phone System integrated with Kandy Business Solutions – to meet its requirement of seamless communication. The Kandy classroom devices were implemented primarily for communication needs from Classrooms to Security, the IT Help Desk, and local Emergency Services. Not only did this result in significant savings; they also resulted in a 99.999% up-time guarantee.

To provide faculty and staff with a seamless communication experience, Synoptek had to carry out the project in a very short period of time: from purchase to integration, implementation, training and support – everything had to be done quickly and efficiently. The team at Synoptek used a very focused approach to put things in place, responded quickly to fluctuating needs, and addressed questions as and when they were thrown. Synoptek provided the following services:

• Set up a hybrid communication environment – Microsoft Teams + Kandy Business Solutions
• Integrated data from their existing (and preceding) communications platforms
• Integrated analog emergency devices into the environment consisting of strategically placed safety weather-proof yellow boxes and emergency blue towers
• Implemented the latest version of Microsoft Teams
• Setup Microsoft Teams accounts for faculty, staff, and students
• Enabled 911 Emergency Services with Direct Location Routing

Benefits

With Synoptek’s guidance and support, the health sciences university has successfully empowered their constituencies to leverage the benefits of Microsoft Teams. Implementing Teams as the University’s primary phone system meant a holistic switch for the entire organization; but thanks to Synoptek and the Teams + Kandy solution that has been implemented, the university is able to make the most of a single hub of productivity. The solution is helping the university:

• Adapt to the pandemic and support a remote workforce with full organization-wide collaboration and telephony
• Simplify the staff’s experience down to a single pane of glass that has reduced confusion and downtime (a single username and password and a single application for daily tasks)

Today, the university receives up 1,000 calls per day that are being answered remotely between their work-at-home staff and limited personnel on campus.