Warblington School
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WARBLINGTON SCHOOL Warblington School replaces a traditional phone system and mobiles with a flexible Microsoft Teams Phone System that can be used on site and remotely. Warblington School is a co-educational community Away from school, staff can call students and display secondary school, located in Havant, Hampshire. Like many Warblington’s phone number. These calls are recorded too schools, Warblington had been relying on a traditional on- to meet safeguarding requirements and to quickly resolve site phone system and ISDN voice services. An account any disputes that may arise. review meeting revealed they were planning to purchase mobile devices and SIMs for teachers and other staff to Teams offers all the required school telephony features; achieve the flexibility and mobility they needed. some have even been improved. For example, an automated attendant can greet and route every call, but when parents The pandemic highlighted an issue for schools in meeting leave voice messages on the absence line, a transcript is their safeguarding requirements. Staff needed to regularly emailed to staff, so they can update the registers and cut and call their students, but did not want to use their own paste details into SIMS. mobiles to avoid revealing their personal numbers. However, if they withheld the number, the student may not The Teams telephony solution uses SIP trunks supported by answer the call so teachers needed to make these calls from the Hampshire HPSN2.1 internet connections in the place of the school phone system even when working from home. ISDN voice services that are being phased out by Openreach. We supplied the school with eight SIP trunks, We recommended switching to a Microsoft Teams Phone rather than a trunk for each of the 30 user licences so System. They had already taken advantage of Microsoft’s Warblington can now handle eight concurrent calls at any foundation licensing for schools to use tools like Teams, time while also keeping costs down. SIP trunks also mean email, file storage, Word, Excel, etc. The phone system that calls to UK landlines and mobiles are free. functionality was an add-on to the Teams app which gave the school all the functionality they required, whether staff A dedicated project manager oversaw the deployment of this were on site, moving around the school or working Microsoft Team Phone System, including end user training. remotely. They use a blend of handsets and headsets to suit The school’s after-care is provided by their account individual user requirements or preference. manager, our service desk and customer services team. Where staff members want a more traditional experience, “Staff have the flexibility to use their device of choice, some they use physical handsets while the headsets connect to have handsets and some use the PC client, but everyone can mobile devices, PCs and laptops to create softphones use their mobile if they need mobility. The call recording operated by on-screen keypads and contact lists. Staff use added an extra level of safeguarding, especially if our staff DECT headsets to give them the flexibility to roam up to need to call isolating pupils and find themselves in a one-to- 100 metres away from their handset or device, and still one conversation. answer calls. Three months on from installation, we are still extremely happy and would recommend Microsoft Teams and swcomms without hesitation.” Carl Knight, network manager .