UC Passes the Test for School District PBX Upgrade

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

Sometimes it is the simple things.

Like many organizations, from businesses and nonprofits to school systems, the Jefferson Union School District was struggling with its legacy PBX (News - Alert) phone system.

“For the past 10 years, we have been having all types of issues with our previous PBX system,” explained Simon Bettis, director of IT services for the school district, during ITEXPO (News - Alert) Las Vegas last month. “It wasn’t reliable. We lost connections, voicemails wouldn’t always get through, and it was expensive when it came to maintenance.”

The school district found itself spending between $25,000 to $30,000 per year just in maintenance costs, and that signaled the need for a change.

“It was not very cost-effective,” noted Bettis with a chuckle.

This led the Jefferson Union School District to select a unified communications system, one that was more reliable, brought higher quality communications, and ultimately boosted both productivity and savings.

While unified communications can deliver a number of new features that copper-wire PBX systems cannot, such as easy videoconferencing and the merging of many communications channels into one, some of the most appreciated benefits of the new system for the school district were pretty basic.

“One example is that we’re getting all our messages now,” said Bettis. “Believe it or not, but that matters. We don’t think about getting messages on time as a big deal, but when we’re dealing with parents, security, student issues and things like that, we want to be able to receive our messages on time.”

Bettis also told us that teachers and staff found the call quality to be much higher, a product of using VoIP technology instead of analogue connections. The voice on the other end of the phone now is much easier to understand, he stressed.

Not that some of the new benefits that unified communications brings to the table go unappreciated.

“We’re not tied down to our desks anymore,” he enthused during our interview. “With softphones, I can basically take my extension with me. We get our voicemails emailed in one inbox, basically, including faxes as well. So basically we’re an office on the go.”

Edited by Alisen Downey