University - Alceo

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM FOR THE UNIVERSITÀ IUAV DI VENEZIA

The BCS communications platform provides the VoIP telephone service, unified communication, and integrated services at the Università IUAV di Venezia. The BCS replaced a communications network served by 6 Alcatel switchboards organized in a star structure and several additional switchboards produced by various manufacturers.

In logistical terms the campus is organized in 8 centers spread across 3 districts of Venice.

The university personnel is made up of about 300 technical/administrative staff and 600 teaching staff. Its communication requirements are met by about 600 VoIP devices used in the various centers and two server ‘nodes’ organized so as to respect new legislative norms relating to CO/DR (Continuous Operation/Disaster Recovery) for public institutions.

Connection to the public phone network is handled by two mirrored gateway systems with the BCS platform based on PATTON4960.

The BCS platform supports unified communication applications such as Fax Server, Voicemail, and IVR Service used as an access portal.

The University’s choice of VoIP phones includes SNOM (SNOM 300, SNOM 360, SNOM 370) devices for all the workstations apart from those requiring special applications or integrated telephone presence structures integrated into the Alceo platform (TANDBERG EDGE75, POLYCOM RMX1500, POLYCOM HDX8000).

An interesting feature of this installation of the BCS VoIP platform is the way it is used to control physical entry to the university buildings: the traditional entry systems have been replaced with VoIP video entryphones which can be integrated with the rest of the platform allowing the transfer of access requests to cell phones or other centers.

Video communication was activated both on PCs using a dedicated application and on other VoIP devices with integrated video support.