France Telecom

France Telecom Strengthens Its Unified Communications with Integrated Solution

France Telecom Group and its Orange brand are renowned for offering customers easy-to-use solutions that help them to achieve significant business benefits. With increased interest in voice over IP (VoIP) from its enterprise customers, France Telecom developed a proof of concept (POC) based on Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007. The company’s Caen-based research and development (R&D) team tested the solution with 100 R&D and administration users. The POC successfully addressed key focus areas, including ease of implementation and convenience of audio devices. Now, the company looks forward to including Microsoft unified communications VoIP features in its IP product road map.

Situation

Presence, IM, telephony, and desktop applications can be completely integrated with Office Communications Server 2007. This will help our customers to achieve huge savings in administration.  Michael Letouzey Project Manager, Orange Labs France Telecom Group

France Telecom Group, a leading telecommunications operator, had consolidated sales of €51.7 billion (U.S.$68.25 billion) in 2006. The company relies on its international Orange Labs network to maintain its reputation for delivering cutting-edge, practical solutions to customers.

France Telecom customers are showing increasing interest in the business potential of voice over IP (VoIP) technology. Orange Business Services, the France Telecom branch dedicated to the business market, began in 2000 to prepare to respond to this consumer opportunity. Its aim is to bring business users new IP communications services such as instant messaging (IM) and presence awareness, which are used by employees to contact their colleagues in the fastest, most appropriate way. With the integration of communications channels, such as e-mail, phone, IM, and conferencing, France Telecom wants to remain at the forefront of the telecommunications industry. The company seeks to improve tools for communication while it lowers overhead by routing voice calls over a data network.

In 2005, Orange Business Services decided to explore all the unified communications options, including Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005, a unified communications solution that integrates with the Microsoft Office system and Windows Server® operating system. So, Orange Business Services asked Orange Labs, its research and development (R&D) entity, to assess the Microsoft solution by deploying an internal trial. Firsthand experience with technology helps the company market new France Telecom services successfully. Business managers assess feedback on the usability and accessibility of new products and services and then use this information to decide whether a new technology will become the basis of a new product bundle.

Gerard Boulay, OCS Program Manager for Orange Labs, says, “Our team found Live Communications Server 2005 easy to deploy, and the presence and IM features helped employees to communicate more spontaneously with colleagues.”

Most Orange Labs employees quickly incorporated the presence awareness and IM features into their everyday communications tools. “Following the success of Live Communications Server 2005 with the R&D team, the presence and IM features can now be used by all France Telecom Group employees. It's also part of our IP product bundle we sell to customers,” says Boulay.

The next step was to offer customers a unified communications solution with integrated VoIP. Boulay says, “Our customers are increasingly asking us to deliver VoIP to their business. VoIP software that can integrate with a broad range of networks and providers will be the deciding factor for our customers looking to invest in a unified communications solution for their company.”

As part of their IP product road map, the Caen-based engineers decided to develop a proof of concept (POC) to assess the voice features of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. After their positive experience with Live Communications Server 2005 deployment and the rapid adoption of IM and presence by employees, engineers were hopeful that the VoIP integration strategy would be much simpler to implement than other unified communications solutions currently available.

Boulay says, “Office Communications Server 2007 is designed, in a first step, for optimal integration with our customers’ existing telephony systems. In a second step, it should be a stand-alone solution without any external [Private Branch Exchange] PBX.  It is also part of the Microsoft unified communications road map, so we expected that technical expertise and support would be widely available.”

In 2007, the team decided to demonstrate voice integration with Office Communications Server 2007 by using an in-house POC to address key customer concerns. It wanted to assess:

• Ease of integration with existing telephony vendor solutions.
• Level of difficulty for IT departments configuring their existing telephony systems with Office Communications Server 2007.
• Whether handsets and soft-phone features enhanced routine communication between colleagues.
• Whether Office Communications Server 2007 could replace the existing telephony infrastructure.

Solution

With Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, an employee can receive his incoming calls at the same time on his IP phone, his Microsoft Office Communicator soft phone, and his mobile so it is much easier for our engineers to be reached.  Michael Letouzey Project Manager, Orange Labs France Telecom Group

In 2007, the R&D team worked with Microsoft Services to deploy Office Communications Server 2007 VoIP features to 100 users, including some from the R&D team and some from administration. These users routinely communicated by phone for more than an hour per day and used IM and presence to regularly contact colleagues. Employees at the company already use presence and IM features daily with  Live Communications Server 2005, and the R&D team configured it to work with Office Communications Server 2007 so pilot users could experience VoIP in an integrated communications environment. Michael Letouzey, Project Manager for Orange Labs, says, “France Telecom Group employees were so quick to incorporate the convenience of IM and presence into the way they worked, we wanted to see how much more they could achieve by incorporating Office Communications Server 2007 into their repertoire of communications tools.”

The R&D team and Microsoft Services team met twice a month to discuss technical issues. This underscored the level of support France Telecom can expect from Microsoft for its future unified communications product development. “The process used internally by Microsoft to solve problems is very effective,” says Letouzey. “We were able to communicate any problems or issues directly to the Microsoft support team based in Seattle, and it responded to us quickly.”

France Telecom upgraded the Active Directory® service in Windows Server 2003 to include the 100 VoIP users. Letouzey explains, “The upgrade was critical, but it was entirely automated and turned out to be simple to manage. Our engineers didn’t waste time figuring out any sophisticated tasks.”

The configuration of a Cisco gateway (the Cisco 3825 Integrated Services Router) to work with Office Communications Server 2007 was also straightforward for the R&D engineers. This gateway converts calls from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and transports them to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, which employees use to manage their voice calls.

France Telecom employees made calls to and received calls from internal and external phone numbers (computer to computer and computer to PSTN) by using the Office Communicator 2007 interface. Employees were also equipped with a Polycom CX700 IP phone, an LG-Nortel IP Phone 8540, or an LG-Nortel USB Phone 8501 handset to complete tasks such as call transfer and redirection in a more convenient way. Polycom and LG-Nortel solutions help improve productivity and reduce IT administration costs. “Our users found the Polycom and LG-Nortel IP phones to be  innovative and easy-to-use devices. They appreciated the fact that they could see if a person was busy, already on the phone, or by which method that person wanted to be contacted,” says Letouzey.

With Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 running in parallel with Office Communications Server 2007, the POC user group could also access e-mail along with IM, presence awareness, and voice. They could move seamlessly through the different methods of communication.

Active Directory integration meant that the same contact list was available on the IP phones and through the Office Communicator 2007 interface. France Telecom users did not need to spend any time reentering contacts. The integration with the corporate directory to find a contact was also appreciated by the users.

Real-time voice activities supported by Office Communications Server 2007 and integrated with Exchange Server 2007 delivered a successful unified communications solution for the 100 users. France Telecom is planning to try different IP phones so it can recommend devices to suit different business needs. The company also plans to incorporate Microsoft unified communications product bundles with its VoIP services in the near future.

Benefits

The POC clearly demonstrated that Office Communications Server 2007 provides a cost-efficient, integrated solution that is easy to deploy and administer. Letouzey says, “Presence, IM, telephony, and desktop applications can be completely integrated with Office Communications Server 2007. This will help our customers to achieve huge savings in administration. For enterprise customers, there is no need to have different specialist teams for telephony and IT. ”

Easy Deployment and Management

The primary focus of the POC was to assess configuration difficulty, and IT engineers in the R&D team were impressed at how straightforward it was to configure their IP/PSTN gateway to interoperate with Office Communications Server 2007.

They were also pleased that Office Communications Server 2007 could run in parallel with Live Communications Server 2005, managed through Active Directory. This ability highlights the benefits of a framework based on an integrated communications strategy and backed by a network of compatible and complementary products. Letouzey says, “For example, we only need to use one Active Directory and one set of administrative tools for both solutions, instead of two. There is also no need to have a dedicated directory for telephony as is the case with a traditional telephony system.”

Reduced Enterprise Costs

Administration costs associated with the management of separate telephony and IT systems are reduced because all communications tools are managed on one operating system. Letouzey says, “The costs are reduced because we already have teams of employees trained in managing the Windows Server operating system.” With voice calls routed over a data network, the cost of telephone calls is reduced. In addition, with employees losing less time trying to contact people, they can bill more time to actual work.

For some organizations, one of the main barriers in the deployment of VoIP across an organization is the cost of the devices. For France Telecom customers who want to reduce their operating costs even further, they can forgo phone devices and simply use economical USB headsets to make voice calls from their computers.

Increased Employee Productivity

The R&D team wanted to see real evidence that showed VoIP features delivered productivity benefits to employees in the POC. Although the trial was small, Letouzey could see that once users became confident with their phone devices and soft phones, they worked much more efficiently. They spent more time completing actual tasks rather than spending hours determining colleagues’ whereabouts and availability. “With Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, an employee can receive his incoming calls at the same time on his IP phone, his Microsoft Office Communicator soft phone, and his mobile so it is much easier for our engineers to be reached.

“With Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, employees have the same services when they are inside or outside the company. When they’re out of the office, they can make and receive calls by using the Office Communicator 2007 client. If one of our team members was working from home, he or she was as accessible as when working from the office,” Letouzey says. “With Office Communicator 2007, we could call a work phone number, for example, but the recipient would answer the call from home. There was no downtime as the team scrambled to find home contact details or phone three different numbers to try and reach the person.” The integration of VoIP with standard Microsoft client applications also provides employees with all their contacts literally at their fingertips. “Employees right-click and start a telephone call when they want to,” says Letouzey.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about France Telecom products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.francetelecom.com

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Document published December 2007