IPcelerate.com

Customer: St. Bonaventure University

About the Customer

St. Bonaventure University is private, Catholic college located on 500 acres in southwestern New York state. Celebrating its 150th anniversary, the University is steeped in history and offers a wide breadth of undergraduate and graduate degrees in liberal arts and science, business, education, journalism and mass communications. The campus includes approximately forty buildings including residence halls, and boasts a tight-knit community of approximately 2,500 students.

Initial Expectations from VoIP

St. Bonaventure replaced their PBX system with VoIP in August 2007, transitioning all but the residence halls to IP. The culture at the University promotes face-to-face contact among faculty and staff, and phone usage is low. Therefore, the actual IP phones were not a critical factor in the transition. However, the University IT staff was already knowledgeable about the inherent cost savings and operational benefits of merging voice and data, and expected the same results at St. Bonaventure. Initial expectations have been met, and the University is enjoying significant cost savings, which is reinvested elsewhere within the college.

Addressing Primary Business Challenges

Prior to transitioning to VoIP, the University was tasked with improving their emergency situation management and notification processes. Their new IP environment opened up a new array of solutions for increasing the safety and security of its staff and students. In addition, the University’s security department needed a new call recording solution, as they had been using the PBX system to manage this task. IPcelerate’s IPsession platform was chosen as the best option for emergency management with 911 alerting and paging, and the IPstudio platform was selected for call recording.

IPcelerate Solutions

With over twenty buildings transitioned to VoIP, the University needed a way to quickly locate the source of outgoing 911 calls. If a 911 call is now made from any campus IP phone, the IPsession server identifies the location of the phone and sends immediate notifications to campus security IP phones and email. This process allows for immediate assistance in an emergency situation, thereby increasing campus safety and security.

In the event of an emergency, campus security now has the ability to send out a page to all IP phones throughout campus. Utilizing IPsession’s Paging solution, pre-configured groups of IP phones have been created for each IP-configured building, thus allowing security to send a page to specific buildings, or all buildings, depending on the situation. With Paging, the University can now easily control the dissemination and content of emergency messaging quickly and easily.

Campus security now uses IPstudio’s Call Recording solution to record all incoming calls. The call recording capability automatically records all calls on both IP phones located in the security office, allowing for later review of calls if needed. Since the majority of faculty and staff contact security in emergency situations instead of calling 911 directly, this recording functionality is critical to security protocol.

New Telephony Experience

VoIP has succeeded in bringing a small, cohesive community closer together. Soft phones – IP phones that work directly through the computer - now provide easy access for faculty and staff to reach out to each other when working from home or off-site. In addition, the University has been able to meet new standards and expectations in emergency management and notification, thus providing a safer and more secure environment for its students, faculty and staff.

Next Steps/Higher Expectations

St. Bonaventure University would like to continue to increase the safety and security of the campus by installing IP Speakers in campus buildings, as well as VoIP phones in the residence halls for the Resident Advisors (RAs). The University is also considering deploying additional IPcelerate solutions including On-Demand Call Recording for executives and Pre-Programmed Conference Calls for automatically initiating conference calls with a pre-determined team of personnel in the event of an emergency.