The city of Biel has good public services, with around 1,200 employees looking after the well-being of the inhabitants. As they operate from forty sites, until now a great deal of time and money has been spent on travelling to meetings. Now it is possible to work together considerably more efficiently using Swisscom’s new Unified Communications and Collaboration solution (UCC).

The UCC solution has provided the city of Biel with a fully integrated and homogenous telco and IT infrastructure. Employees use all modern communications channels, ranging from VoIP telephony, instant messaging, conferencing and desktop sharing to e-mail, fax and voicemail. Instead of operating two separate contact lists, as used to be the case, now it is no problem to make telephone calls using the Microsoft Outlook contacts.

Thanks to the new solution, the municipal authority can now reduce the number of meetings both with employees in house and with external partners. Those responsible are delighted with the options offered by the new communications tools.