Catholic Education Diocese of Cairns

After undertaking a rigorous RFQ, vendor selection and product demonstration process, the RingCentral RingEX unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform was chosen from the shortlist, based on its compliance with requirements, simplicity of administration, and cost-effectiveness. That also included the lease of 1,100 physical handsets, which ensured there was no capital expense in the rollout project, and CEDC could rely on predictable costs over the lifetime of the platform.

Working in collaboration with RingCentral Professional Services, CEDC completed a staged rollout over six months of 1,400 extensions to its central office and 28 of CEDC’s 30 schools. To ensure a smooth transition, prior to rollout the project team undertook extensive data collation, requirements validation, network tests, deployment plans and training with each school.

All the physical handsets were pre-configured by RingCentral so that there was minimal on-site work required.

“One of our more creative team members 3D printed a template for the wall mounting bracket holes, as these were different to the existing handsets. We gave these to maintenance staff to help, by having screws in place for the day of the rollout. This was a huge time saver on rollout days as it made the process a quick swap over,” said Norman.

While most of the schools deployed new handsets, CEDC central office is now 100% softphone – using either the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams embedded dialler or the RingCentral app for mobile devices – reducing complexity and overall costs. With central office planning to move into a new building that has also allowed CEDC to design more flexible working spaces for staff.

User experience and business continuity

CEDC’s original scope was to replace its telephony with like-for-like functionality, but ended up making a lot more improvements than originally planned based on the capabilities of the platform and the positive user response to the rollout. The ability to customise features for each school really stood out.

“RingCentral has more features, is more modern, and there's a lot more that we can do just to make that user experience better. We set up a nice, clean company directory on the handsets themselves. We set up call queues and customised greetings for every school, and scheduling for when reception switches on and off – previously, that was all a manual button on a phone. We thought the schools might react negatively to that, but they were actually all excited,” said Norman.

CEDC is also seeing business continuity benefits from the RingCentral cloud-based platform. In an area that is frequently hit by tropical storms and cyclones, widespread power and network outages are a constant threat. Prior to RingCentral, when the main PABX or reception console goes down, CEDC loses connectivity to that school until a diversion can be put in place with the carrier, which might take days. When storms in early 2025 took out a lot of the region’s infrastructure, CEDC schools switched over to the RingCentral app on their mobile phones and continued receiving and making calls.

“All our schools went offline at the same time because of a carrier issue, but we were able to put business continuity in place for every school within an hour,” said Norman.

The end-to-end experience with RingCentral has been overwhelmingly positive, said Norman, “RingCentral accommodated all of the requests we had with configuration. We had a few licensing issues and handset malfunctions early on, but RingCentral was always responsive, addressing any problems promptly.”

CEDC is currently exploring everything that is possible with the RingCentral platform, particularly around core management, reporting and analytics, which includes providing feedback to schools around their call usage and call history.