The New Testament Church of God (NTCG) has deployed SwyxWare Unified Communications system to centrally manage the network and provide its ministers access to a converged system irrespective of their location.
The church is currently implementing SwyxWare at 25 district churches and plans to extend it to all its 108 churches and 22 missions throughout England and Wales. The district churches, acting as local hubs, will provide local support to the branches. The church is said to have reduced its costs by over 50% at its headquarters in Northampton where the roll-out is complete.
The Reverend Louis McLeod, national secretary and treasurer at the NTCG, said: “We anticipate that the improved communications the system offers for an individual branch church will foster much closer communication with other local churches, their community and head office, improving accessibility to members everywhere. Our initial calculations also predict major financial benefits for the church as the costs of calls and line rentals are reduced throughout the organisation.”
SwyxWare, based on Microsoft Windows applications, was deployed at the NTCG by Swyx reseller Shiva Technology. Shiva first integrated the church’s education centre, which is located a few miles away from the headquarters. This has brought the education centre on to the network of the headquarters, enabling transfer of calls between the two centres.
McLeod has said that with the deployment of SwyxWare, the church was able to cut multiple line rental and traditional system service/maintenance charges. Call recording for messages and electronic filing of voice mails, voicemail/email integration ensured that the calls were not missed.
The Association of Science Education at Hatfield University recently replaced its old circuit switched PBX with SwyxWare IP telephony system for unified voice and data network. SwyxWare is expected to improve availability of staff to help with membership enquiries and orders for the association’s publications.
