Leighton musters IPtel presence

The completion of the project, which brought together technology from Cisco, Microsoft and Genesys was announced today by the project's integrator Dimension Data.

DiData claimed the solution was Australia's first live production environment to integrate IP telephony from Cisco with Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS). Leighton uses also Microsoft's Office 2003 productivity suite.

This meant contact and presence information would be consolidated across business applications, the IP telephony environment, e-mail, Intranet and instant messaging, according to the integrator.

"Dimension Data developed the LCS solution as part of a project to deploy a managed operating environment for Leighton Contractors nationally, together with a new IP telephony core, wireless and security infrastructure, and directory and messaging upgrade," the company said.

In DiData's statement, Leightons' IT infrastructure and services manager Scott Ferguson said the solution was ideal for Leighton's "decentralised and flexible management structure".

"The catalyst for Leighton Contractors was our recent move to a new corporate office in Sydney," he said. The solution also covered the NSW branch office of Leighton's construction division.

"The project-based nature of our work, together with short timeframes often required to relocate or establish new operations made a less-rigid communications infrastructure very attractive," Ferguson said.

He added Leighton could make changes to its environment with "minimal business disruption" due to the integrated Microsoft/Cisco system, with further deployment having "the ability to scale nationally and globally at an extremely low cost".