New phone system rolling out across all McMaster campuses

Over 8,000 phones across McMaster campuses are in the process of being replaced with the new Avaya Aura® Platform. About 3,000 faculty and staff have already been migrated to the new Avaya Aura phones, including all of the campus remote locations. The UTS Enterprise Networks Team, which supports McMaster’s telephony environment, began this phased rollout in 2016 and is undertaking the necessary transition one building at a time to minimize impact to faculty and staff and manage costs. Completion is expected in 2020.

This large scale project will equip users with Avaya phones that provide new mobility features including ‘simultaneous ringing’ on both their desktop unit and their mobile device, giving users the choice of where they would like to take the call, digital voicemail which sends voicemail to email, and a ‘soft client’ that facilitates access to the phone system from a laptop or PC. Users keep their existing five-digit extension once they’ve moved over to the new system with little to no downtime in between.

“Migrating to the Avaya Aura® Platform was a huge opportunity for us to upgrade our equipment and network at a minimal cost to the university thanks to competitive pricing and the ability to use current equipment licensing,” says Paula Brown-Hackett, Senior Manager, UTS. “We’re very excited about how the new technology will help us work smarter and provide more mobility and flexibility.”

Department administrators are being contacted by UTS to advise of timing for the installation of the new phones within each department.

The Avaya system still requires users to dial 9, before an external number. This includes the need to dial ‘9’ before dialling ‘9-1-1’.