A RingCentral MVP Experience

By Fay Young, Information Technology Manager for the City of Port Arthur

Moving to a cloud telephone system may no longer be unusual, but it was a new experience for the City of Port Arthur and a consideration for other Cities. That is why I am sharing our experience of moving to Ring Central. We moved from an on-prem Avaya phone system to a hybrid Cisco system six years ago. That hybrid environment consisted of on-prem equipment and equipment located in Irving, TX. The Irving location was connected to the network via AT&T ASE. If the phone equipment in our primary location was unavailable, the telephones pulled dial tone from the Irving location. Our mobile client was also connected through the Irving location. This implementation was done shortly after Hurricane Harvey had a devasting impact on the City of Port Arthur. Therefore, the ability to have telephone service when the primary location is unavailable significantly influenced the system design.  

This year, our Cisco telephone system equipment reached EOL. After completing several proofs of concept, we decided to move our non-public safety phone system to a cloud-based service and to leave the public safety system on-prem. The decision to keep public safety on-prem was based on our inability to replicate some of the police department’s operational practices in a cloud-based environment. For everyone else, we chose RingCentral MVP.

The overall process of implementing RingCentral went smoothly. The biggest challenge we had was porting numbers from AT&T to RingCentral. We decided to keep everyone on the same telephone system throughout the conversion process rather than have multiple migration dates. If you have ever had to deal with AT&T, then you know getting anything done through them can cause you to learn and say words you shouldn't say in front of children. It took two months for AT&T to get to the point where we could port all the numbers on the same day. On Halloween 2023, we ripped off the band-aide and went live on RingCentral.  

We worked with RingCentral to build the call groups, pick-up groups, contact centers, and other configurations before going live. After going live, we made minor adjustments, like adding numbers to pick-up groups and call queues. So far, we have not had any significant issues. We expect to see some cost savings due to the migration. We ended our Equature call recording and call center contract. ISI Infortel Select is no longer needed. We are eliminating AT&T ASE, VoIP, and SIP circuits for two locations. And since the MVP license includes eFax, we are eliminating the AT&T fax lines. Saying “eliminating AT&T” makes me smile.

The users have adapted very well. The Cisco phones we have are not compatible with RingCentral. We chose Polycom instead of the Chinese-made Yealink phones to avoid future issues. We gave them their new telephones a couple of weeks before going live and provided instructions on swapping old phones with new ones. They are learning to navigate the new phones and the RingCentral desktop application. RingCentral provided two end-user virtual training classes. Of course, I missed them and have not watched the recordings. If you have called me in the last few weeks and I didn't answer, it is possible that I tried and didn't know how. It took me a week to realize that the new ringtone was my phone ringing. I never claimed to be an expert with gadgets.