The Western Australia Disability Services Commission is looking to upgrade its videoconferencing infrastructure to better communicate with remote staff, consumers, disability service organisations and other State and Federal Government agencies.
The new set up will see new room-sized video conferencing units set up across ten sites in the state. These units will replace the Commission’s seven year old Polycom units and will improve user experience, offer better functionality and reliability, and expand connectivity.
Videoconferencing software client licences will also be acquired for 100 desktops to allow internal staff to communicate with internal and external Commission users.
The implementation will be fully integrated with the Commission’s existing networking environment and provide a single central management console to provide management, configuration, logging and reporting.
The Microsoft Office Communication Platform will be a key part of the deployment and will allow for pop up invitations to join video conferences, bookings for video conferences using Outlook, the sharing of documents between people in a video conference, and telephone link ups to video conferences.
The new video conferencing infrastructure will also allow for on-line learning and the recording and archiving of conference sessions.
The Commission has a highly distributed work environment with a head office in Perth, six satellite offices, as well as 24 regional and 22 metropolitan Local Area Coordination offices.
The Commission’s network runs a range of technologies including ADSL, point-to-point fibre and laser connections. The organisation is also undertaking an optimisation of its Wide Area Network (WAN).