2 page Case Study - Posted 12/20/2007

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Bell Canada

Communications Provider Expects to Improve Productivity, Reduce Costs with VoIP Solution

As Canada’s largest telecommunications company, Bell wants to create a more integrated, easy-to-navigate, and cost-efficient real-time communications environment for its workers. The initial results of testing the unified communications functionality in Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 show the potential to increase productivity within remote and local teams and avoid costs associated with administration, hardware, and travel.

Business Needs

Bell provides a comprehensive and constantly evolving range of communications services to residential and business customers throughout Canada. Headquartered in Montreal, Bell employs 37,000 knowledge workers who are always looking for ways to provide more effective services to customers.

In 2002, the company began a search for a way to improve its internal communications and to better support its approximately 10,000 remote workers. These employees connect to the corporate network through a high-performance virtual private network provided by Bell. The challenge was to enhance interoffice communications for employees located in cities across Canada. Bell knowledge workers were using conference-call bridges for audio conferencing between offices. They used video conferencing much less often because of the time it took to reserve a room and get all the attendees assembled in the same place.

In 2005, Bell began using Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005 and the Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 client for instant messaging (IM) and presence, which enhanced the employees’ ability to communicate in real time. In 2006, the company started looking for ways to build on those capabilities. At about the same time, Microsoft approached Bell with an opportunity to test its new voice technology. “We knew that voice integration with the desktop was going to happen, so we were interested in evaluating new products targeted to creating a more integrated real-time communications environment,” says Norm Leduc, Manager of Infrastructure for Real Time Collaboration at Bell.

Solution

With the on-premise Web conferencing in Office Communications Server 2007 and fairly inexpensive webcams, we can easily set up audio and video conferences on the fly.  Norm Leduc Manager of Infrastructure for Real Time Collaboration Bell Canada

In early 2007, Bell Canada agreed to run a trial of the voice over IP (VoIP) functionality and the audio, video, and Web conferencing capabilities in Office Communications Server 2007 within the IT department. The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 voice component connects directly to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) gateway. The gateway features multipath architecture for drop-in installation, a unified communications proxy for any-to-any switching, and survivability for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)−based branch office applications.

Bell IT teams in Toronto and in Ottawa tested the Microsoft RoundTable™ audio/video conferencing room device to connect with each other on a more personal level. RoundTable has a speaker phone at its base with a 360-degree camera on a short stem above it. The device connects to a standard desktop computer and uses the audio and video conferencing functionality in Office Communications Server 2007 to present a panoramic, side-by-side view of everyone participating in a video conference. RoundTable automatically detects who is speaking and displays that person in an expanded window, while the group view remains in place.

Bell also uses the conferencing capabilities in Office Communications Server 2007 for peer-to-peer video-conference calls. “With the on-premise Web conferencing in Office Communications Server 2007 and fairly inexpensive webcams, we can easily set up audio and video conferences on the fly,” says Leduc.

Because all of these capabilities are available from within a single application, Bell users can easily move from IM to voice to video as needed. In a typical scenario, two people might be communicating through IM with Office Communicator 2007 and then agree they need to escalate to voice so they click the phone icon on the screen to convert the IM to a voice call. Then they decide that they need to add video so they click on the webcam icon, which brings them virtually face to face. If they need to expand the video conference, they can click another icon to escalate to a Web conferencing session and invite additional people.

Of the 1,000 Bell employees who are currently using Office Communications Server 2007, approximately 125 use the Web conferencing capabilities regularly. “Those 125 people have been inviting other people who are downloading the Web conferencing console and logging in, so use is spreading,” says Leduc. Bell is working closely with Microsoft and a number of hardware partners to test and develop the next generation of unified communications and collaboration technologies.

Benefits

Through its preliminary trial testing of Microsoft unified communications technologies, including software-based VoIP, Bell sees the potential to increase productivity and reduce travel, video conferencing, and administration costs.

• Increased productivity. Tight integration with the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 helps save time in responding to missed calls. “If somebody calls me and I don’t answer, a message is sent to the Outlook inbox saying I missed the call,” says Leduc. “Then my mobile device will alert me with an e-mail message that includes a hyperlinked number for the caller that I can just click to return the call.”
• Reduced travel costs. Using the conferencing capabilities in Office Communications Server 2007, Bell Canada can set up impromptu audio and video conferences with other staff as needed. This has the potential to reduce travel costs.
• Simplified administration. Microsoft unified communications technologies use the Active Directory® service in Windows Server to combine names, Private Branch Exchange (PBX) extensions, e-mail addresses, and logons within a single corporate directory, which simplifies administration.

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Document published December 2007