Mosman Church of England Preparatory School

Making a like-for-like replacement of its legacy hardware PABX system with RingCentral’s cloud telephony solution, 120-year-old Mosman Prep is now enjoying significant monthly savings, with scope for future enhancements to the platform.

mosmanprep.nsw.edu.au

30%

reduction in monthly telephony costs

Highly available

Highly available, secure and reliable voice services

Rapid resolution

Provisioning issue with handsets rapidly resolved to meet cutover deadline

Minimal impact

Minimal user impact and advanced features for administrative staff

The initial set up, and the communication and support from RingCentral was excellent.

Mosman Church of England Preparatory School

Director of Technology

With a rich history of educational excellence, Mosman Church of England Preparatory School (Mosman Prep) is a vibrant community that empowers boys to thrive. The school is of a size where every boy is known personally, with students across Early Entry to Year 6. Specialising in boys-only education and guided by its motto, Non Nobis Solum - Not for Ourselves Alone, Mosman Prep’s approach to education and pastoral care strives to strengthen the pillars of trustworthiness, respect, caring, fairness and citizenship.

A lean IT department

Mosman Prep runs a very lean IT department, with its Director of Technology juggling both his administrative and teaching commitments with the support of a third-party managed IT services provider.

In early 2023, Mosman Prep’s telephony service agreement had expired, and the school was on a month-to-month arrangement with its provider when an upcoming building renovation required a decision to be made to either move or decommission its on-premise PABX hardware.

Mosman Prep reviewed a number of voice-over-IP (VoIP) systems before accepting the recommendation from its managed services provider to implement RingEX, a cloud phone system that effectively replicated the features of its existing environment.

INDUSTRY

Education

Sydney, Australia

YEAR FOUNDED

1904

EMPLOYEES

School holiday cutover

Allowing a whole term to prepare for the migration, Mosman Prep scheduled the cutover for the mid-year school holidays to ensure the least amount of disruption. The school worked with a RingCentral case manager who ensured the design and implementation phases were kept on track with weekly scheduled updates.

“The initial set up, and the communication and support from RingCentral was excellent,” said the Director of Technology.

The cutover date was set for the first Friday of the school holidays with 50 new pre-configured handsets to be deployed for administration staff and in each classroom. However, when Mosman Prep’s Director of Technology tried to instal the plug-and-play Yealink handsets, he discovered they weren’t connecting. After trying to resolve the issue himself with RingCentral providing remote advice, he contacted RingCentral’s Australian Professional Services team who came on-site and diagnosed the problem as an IP addressing error by the handset distributor.

“RingCentral’s technician was completely apologetic, and said he would come in and give me a hand to manually change the address on each handset. I was happy to do it myself, as it only took about five minutes for each phone as I plugged them in. The handsets were all deployed smoothly and everything's working well,” he said. “There was an issue and it was resolved – and better than my expectations. To me, that speaks volumes.”

Creating cost efficiencies

Mosman Prep has designed the system to minimise its monthly costs by deploying each classroom handset with a more cost-effective device licence, rather than assigning it to a specific teacher or user. Full user licences have just been assigned to the school’s executive team and administrative staff, which gives these users greater visibility on the status of each extension, access to advanced features and more functionality in putting calls on hold or transferring them.

“We mirrored the same setup that we had previously in our classrooms, including the same extension numbers as well. That way, everyone is happy and the new handsets are being used exactly the same way by the teachers. The only difference is for our receptionist, who is loving the soft phone. She uses the RingCentral app on her Windows PC with a headset, and she's able to walk out to the staff room without missing a call,” said the Director of Technology.

By deploying RingCentral, Mosman Prep has implemented a secure, reliable and highly available voice service which has enhanced the functionality, flexibility and usability of the old system for all staff. The solution is now saving the school 30% on its monthly telephony costs and providing the flexible platform to add enhancements and new features in the future. Most importantly, those cost savings are now being invested towards Mosman Prep’s mission to create positive and meaningful experiences for every boy at the school.