Unified Communications Assignment

Part 1 - Design and planning

This part requires you to prepare an architecture design of the unified communications solution and a deployment plan.

Scenario

You are employed by Pacific IT Solutions, an IT services company providing systems integration and consultancy services. You have been appointed as an IT consultant for Online Travel Services (OTS) which is a client of Pacific IT Solutions.

Background

OTS is a national organisation within Australia with 7 retail and sales offices in Australian capital cities and a central office and Data Centre on the Gold Coast. All the sites are connected to the central office via VPN. In total OTS employs 120 people across the organisation with the majority of the staff provided with remote access through either a dial-up or a virtual private network (VPN) connection.

Business Profile

Global Travel Pty Ltd (The Company) is a leading provider of Travel services in the Asia Pacific region with headquarters in Singapore. The Company is the holding group for five smaller companies: OTS, Asia Hotel Services, APAC Flight Brokers, Asia Adventure Holidays and Happy Insurance. All of the companies owned by The Company focus on their individual target markets and employ several hundred staff. The Company is currently trying to reduce its costs and decrease the time it takes to break into new markets. OTS is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Company

The business was setup in 2001 by the General Manager (Jack Slasher) and run from a small office on the Gold Coast until 2004, when the business was bought by Global Travel Pty Ltd and expanded to have offices nationally. This offered the ability for OTS to expand from the online travel services to offer personalized service to clients through the regional offices. OTS targets the provision of specialist travel packages to high value clients, advertising the packages it offers through the website. The business is currently highly successful, with a turnover in the last financial year of over $100 million and a profit of $6 million.

Current technology

OTS does not currently have any unified communications technologies. The company uses a legacy PBX and all calls are made using the PSTN.

All servers are deployed in a VMWare virtualized environment. They have enough spare capacity in the VMWare virtualized environment to deploy any additional virtual servers they may need. All servers are attached to a Gigabit network.

Requirements

OTS has obtained a feasibility report in relation to migrating their telecommunications systems to a solution that uses a relatively low cost SIP trunking service provided by an ITSP. They have decided to proceed with the migration as it will provide substantial savings on their telephone costs. They will start with an implementation of IP telephony at their Gold Coast office. This means that they will replace their current PSTN lines with a SIP trunk, replace their legacy PBX with a VoIP PBX, and replace their legacy handsets with SIP compatible handsets.

You have been given the task of designing the solution. Your contact at OTS is the office manager, Jane Moss, who will also sign off on the project completion. Your design and implementation plan must provide for the following: An IP telephony solution that will:

1. Use SIP trunking

2. Use SIP compatible handsets

3. Provide flexibility to expand and link to other sites

4. Provide call parking, call queuing, voice mail, ring groups, and an IVR service

5. Achieve these outcomes with minimal cost

Task 1

Research the following VoIP technologies.

• Asterisk

• Shoretel

• Cisco

Compare the technologies on the following criteria. Create a table/matrix showing the comparison.

• Cost

• Scalability

• Size of online community

• Quality of support documentation

• Ability to integrate with legacy PBX

• Features - voice mail, IVR, etc.

Task 2

Write a description of the solution you envisage. Assume that you have chosen Asterisk as the solution. You should include:

1. A description of the architecture - include VoIP, IP telephony, network, and firewall elements

2. A thorough explanation of how your solution will work - the exact process of how calls are made, received, interfaced with the PSTN

3. An explanation of how your solution meets the business requirements

4. A description of each component 5. The rational for the design decisions you made

Task 3

Compile an inventory of hardware and software components. You must include the recommended hardware requirements for an Asterisk/FreePBX installation for an organization of this size.

Task 4

Prepare a work breakdown of your deployment plan.

Task 5

Write a post deployment test plan.

Task 6

Create a drawing of the solution using Visio. Include all physical and virtual components