Lawton Public Schools

Regrouping 31 schools, 15,000 students and 2,300 administrative, teaching and support personnel in the state of Oklahoma, the Lawton Public School (LPS) District’s legacy phone systems are quite outdated, complex to manage and costly to maintain and operate. To help address these challenges, LPS decided to migrate all of their old landline-based phone systems to a next-generation internet-based system.

The E-MetroTel UCx VOIP solution was selected for its simple, cost-effective yet flexible and feature-rich architecture that consolidates all of the different phone systems into a single, centralized server platform without having to incur the high cost of immediately replacing hundreds of existing digital and analog phones. Technology partner Vic Telecommunications installed a high availability UCx1000E server in our central administration office that is networked using SIP trunks to survivable UCx20 servers in each of the schools, ensuring parents and personnel alike always have open lines of communication.

Everyone working at LPS will benefit from having access to the same new features and applications across the entire school district including call transfer, call recording, conferencing, unified messaging, voice-mail to text, notifier and scheduled announcement. We are expecting annual savings of $60,000 and are eager to have all our remaining schools transferred over to the UCx from E-MetroTel.

Zeldon D. Rice, Director Information Technology
Lawton Public Schools

Universidad de Puerto Rico

Our long-term strategy is to modernize our IT infrastructure to make the University of Puerto Rico a showcase for Unified Communications and a model for other institutions in Puerto Rico. With the E-MetroTel UCx1000 system, we were easily able to migrate to an open SIP-based platform that simplifies our IT network and significantly reduces our operating costs by migrating our Nortel Meridian 1 PBXs. The users continue using their phones - digital, IP and analog - but now get the benefits of integrated UC productivity tools including Unified Messaging, Conferencing and Smartphone client solution. We are very pleased with the performance of the UCX solution.

Víctor Díaz, Director, Office of Information Systems
University of Puerto Rico, Central Administration

Altamont Community Unit School District

Our mission at Altamont Community Unit School District is to educate the scholastic community, enhance their abilities and transform opportunities into action. When presented with the opportunity to replace our schools aging and unreliable Norstar telephone systems with a single next-generation solution that gave us all the unified communication features we were looking for while at the same time lowering our communications costs, the decision was clear. Installing the E-MetroTel UCx450 server was very simple and the system is very easy to use. The UCx Scheduled Announcement application is easy to program and can play bell tones to indicate class start on any one of our existing phones, in any of our schools. By centralizing our schools communication network with the UCX and retaining existing class room phones helped simply our infrastructure and reduce our overall costs by 50%.

Tim Torbeck, IT Director
Altamont Community Unit School District