Manchester Academy School Case Study
Since opening in September 2003, Manchester Academy has established itself as a school transforming the futures of some of the most disadvantaged young people. It fulfils a major role in the regeneration of the area and in contributing to community capacity. The Academy has close and highly effective partnerships with renowned universities, local and nationwide businesses, as well as United Learning.
United Learning is a national group made up of over fifty schools from the maintained and independent sectors. The group is always keen to employ appropriate technologies to further its core educational mission, wherever a benefit can be demonstrated.
MAS’ Challenges
As their existing Cisco system had been in place for more than 10 years, it was identified as a security risk and therefore earmarked for replacement. With limited budget, they needed to find a solution which reduced operational costs long term, while allowing them to use future IT budgets for strategic IT projects, rather than paying to maintain expensive telephone hardware and old ISDN services.
Key to its predicament, the school required much greater control of the telephony system including the ability to make changes in-house. Other requisites included virtualisation of the solution within the schools existing server infrastructure, and a handful of new time saving features such as Call Recording and Click-to-Call from the user’s desktop. The solution would also need to be simple to deploy, in order to keep installation costs low.

The Solution
Key Benefits
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