Connecting the Lower Austrian Government: NextiraOne implements Unified Communications Solution for the State Administration

New Communications link 13,000 users across Lower Austria’s 212 Government sites

Vienna – 7 October 2009 [09:00 CET]. NextiraOne, Europe’s leading expert in communications services, and the IT-Directorate of the regional government of Lower Austria have implemented a complete upgrade of the voice communications for the State Administration within a timescale of 16 months. Around 13,000 employees at 212 sites have been upgraded to new Voice over IP telephony and the latest Unified Communications system.

The new communications solution is based on a comprehensive server infrastructure built around two redundant Data Centres. The two blade centres are linked via IP and house an OmniPCX Enterprise from Alcatel-Lucent, plus fax and call servers that provide state-of-the-art Voice over IP (VoIP) technology for the 13,000 users on all sites and systems. NextiraOne provides central network management for the blade centres under a Managed Services agreement.

The communications infrastructure covers the Regional Government buildings in St. Pölten, together with retirement homes, young people’s homes and care homes, road maintenance and other government offices in Lower Austria’s 21 districts. All sites now have state-of-the-art systems that provide improved communications with the general public and better availability of services.

New digital telephones have been provided for staff, linked with a digital telephone directory that allows users to find colleagues’ numbers simply by choosing their names.  The phones are also connected to an Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch Unified Communications system (OTUC) so that users can access Unified Communications applications via Microsoft Outlook plug-ins, making phone calls by simple mouse click directly from Outlook.

The ability to combine telephone and desktop functions has been well received by users, as has the integration of fax options through a new e-Fax system. Fax communication continues to be one of the most important means of communication for the regional government of Lower Austria. In addition to fulfilling the legal requirements, it is also important to make communications as easy as possible for the general public. Incoming faxes are now electronically transferred into the mailbox of the relevant member of staff. The combining of the various channels of communication via the desktop has significantly improved the work environment and increased the efficiency of the communications system. The introduction of Free Desktop and Voice Navigator applications have also helped to make government employees more accessible to the general public.

Telephone numbers have been migrated to the new VoIP solution so that the existing numbers are still  in use in all districts – the citizen‘s hotline and the housing services Call Centre have both been upgraded as part of the new infrastructure and this is providing faster connections, shorter waiting times and improved accessibility so that the right person is reached more quickly through intelligent call routing and interactive queuing.

Dr. Wolfgang Nebes, Director of the Regional Administration and Representative for the Lower Austria State Government commented: “Members of the public talk to people, not to machines. Therefore the aim of the project for us was to make it easier to reach the right person, irrespective of which communications channel was being used. We have worked with NextiraOne for a long time and have had a very successful partnership. The solution developed by NextiraOne provided a flexible, creative and innovative infrastructure that meets all our needs.”

“The Lower Austrian State Government implementation is the largest project that NextiraOne Austria has undertaken and connects over 13,000 government workers and 1.6 million citizens. The project has been a major success for our team and clearly demonstrates the added value the latest communications technologies can bring to organisations of any size and in any sector,” said Dr. Margarete Schramböck, Vice President Germany & Austria NextiraOne.