St Edmund's College

Streamlined Collaboration

Kyocera put together an innovative approach that enabled the oldest Catholic school in England to migrate to a new Mitel solution with integrated MS Teams and Microsoft education software. This has enabled improved learning outcomes as staff are able to communicate effectively.

• Rationalised all existing Mitel licenses.
• Moved to a Kyocera private cloud environment that saved fixed line costs.
• Better up time with latest generation software and hardware.
• Increased security due to cloud environment conforming to latest ISO certification.

About the Customer

Founded in 1568, St Edmund's College is a co-educational private day and boarding school, set in 440 acres in Ware, Hertfordshire and has operated from its current site since 1793. It is the oldest continuously operating post-Reformation Catholic school in the country and caters for children aged 3 to 18. 

As a school, St Edmund’s College have made a conscious effort to focus on ways to decrease their carbon footprint and make the college as  environmentally friendly as possible. The college has been awarded an Eco Schools Green Flag which celebrates the ecological achievements of students engaging with environmental issues and demonstrates that a school or college is forward-thinking and actively involved in protecting the planet.

The Challenge

The existing Mitel Flex solution was end of life, could not be patched with the latest security updates, and was built on old hardware which was slow and not fit for purpose, resulting in regular outages, delays and compromised security.

Mitel Flex did not fully integrate with MS Teams or the Microsoft educational software that the college continues to use. The only solution they believed available was purchasing multiple MS phone licences, which would have been costly, and the installation of fixed line telephony would have involved installing extra cabling into a listed building.

Without an integrated solution staff were forced to use disparate systems daily which was time consuming and inefficient.

The Solution

Kyocera recommended an alternative approach with a series of staged upgrades to overcome St Edmund’s College challenges.

The various current leased lines were rationalised resulting in significant savings.

Moving to a private cloud environment enabled the seamless installation of the latest patches, better security as well as replication of the system to enable backups and a disaster recovery process.

Installation of Mitel MiVoice and MiCollab allowed for the integration of MS Teams and Microsoft education software, giving staff a single unified solution.

Why Kyocera?

St Edmund’s College, as an existing managed service customer benefited from Kyocera’s proactive approach and recommendation of an upgraded
system.

Kyocera’s Collaboration team were praised for the well-executed delivery. The planning, design and execution of the project highlighted possible issues that were quickly resolved before migration to the new Mitel platform.

Jason Harknett, Technical Services Manager, St Edmund’s College commented “Kyocera were great from the start to finish. We had weekly catch-up calls for project updates, access to a dedicated engineer throughout and they even arranged for an engineer to attend site on a Saturday so that there was minimal disruption to our users whilst we migrated to our new setup.”

The Results

Since migrating to the new Mitel system, St Edmund’s have seen several benefits.

The combination of MiVoice and MiCollab benefits staff who now have a single-entry point into the system with the Mitel solution controlling all the traditional PBX features. This has streamlined collaboration and made communication easier between the St Edmund’s staff. With more processing power, the new private cloud solution has reduced downtime considerably, making everything faster and more reliable.

The Kyocera private cloud solution enables St Edmund’s College to scale computing resources based on demand, which has led to more efficient
energy use compared to maintaining the old fixed on-premise hardware. The cloud solution has negated the need for more cabling, helping to preserve their listed building.

Kyocera has delivered considerable savings for St Edmund’s following the rationalisation of the existing fixed lines which allowed for the migration to the new collaboration system.