Published:
ShoreTel Helps Educational Institutions Make the Grade With Lower Costs, Improved Focus on Teaching
SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 8, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ShoreTel(R),
Inc. (Nasdaq: SHOR), a leading provider of Pure IP Unified Communications
solutions, is finding the increased adoption of the company's unified
communications solutions among educational institutions globally. These
institutions have found that ShoreTel enables educational institutions to
lower costs, allow teachers to spend more time teaching, increases staff
productivity, and prepare for emergency situations and disaster recovery.
ShoreTel has announced successful deployments of an easy-to-install,
easy-to-maintain ShoreTel unified communications solution inClaremore Public
Schools inOklahoma, Dougherty County School System inGeorgia, Palisades
Charter High School inCalifornia, North Central Texas College, and Southern
Polytechnic State University inGeorgia. In the U.K., Coleg Glan Hafren has
deployed -- and Trafford College and the Institute of Development Studies at
the University of Brighton will soon be deploying -- a ShoreTel unified
communications solution. InNew Zealand, Te Totara Public School and Aberdeen
Primary School have recently been deployed. Case studies for some of these
deployments and more are available at
http://www.shoretel.com/solutions/industry/education.html.
"Educational institutions are clearly responding to ShoreTel's ability to
deliver communications with impact," said Steve Timmerman, vice president of
marketing at ShoreTel. "Reduced call costs and lower deployment costs impact
the bottom line. Ease of use impacts efficiency and productivity, allowing
teachers to focus on teaching instead of administration. But the most
important impacts of ShoreTel's distributed software architecture are
fostering collaboration and improving the safety of educational environments."
By connecting campuses and putting telephones in every classroom, ShoreTel
lets teachers, staff and parents work more closely together to improve the
learning experience for each and every student. ShoreTel also enables
efficient notification in the event of emergencies and provides N+1 redundancy
for survivability in the event of a natural disaster.
Claremore Public Schools,Oklahoma
The K-12 Claremore Independent School District, with nine campuses, needed
a phone system that was cost-effective, easy to manage, scalable, and flexible
enough to support numerous moves, adds and changes. With ShoreTel, the
district has enjoyed clear IP-based calls and a powerful feature set that
improves employee productivity.
"The school district environment requires that many moves, adds, and
changes be made to the phone system on a continual basis," said Terry Simpson,
director of technology with theClaremore Public Schools. "The ShoreTel system
allows us to handle changes efficiently and cost-effectively with minimum
support staff. This results in significant savings for us -- up to $2,000 per
year because we had to have someone come in at the beginning of each year to
make changes with the old system. I can even make these changes from home
anytime, including changes to the auto attendant message."
Dougherty County School System,Georgia
With 40 locations, 18,000 students, 1,900 faculty and staff, and an old
PBX phone system, Dougherty County School System was spending $12,000 to
$15,000 every month on its phone bill. With ShoreTel's IP-based unified
communications solution, the district is now saving at least $150,000 per year
by operating with 500 fewer lines, blocking 411 directory calls and 800 calls,
and closely controlling long distance calling.
"With the cost savings and all the features we have, ShoreTel has been by
far the best technical addition I've seen," said Bill Freeman, technical
services supervisor for Dougherty County School
System and a 25-year employee with the district.
Palisades Charter High School,California
Palisades Charter High School wanted a telephone system with greater
flexibility, custom features the school could manage on its own, and security
features to improve emergency responsiveness. With ShoreTel, student and
facility security is enhanced with the ShoreTel E911 Notification Application,
which automatically notifies appropriate personnel in the event of a 911 call.
See the press release at
http://www.shoretel.com/about/press_room/2008/01-09.html.
"The ShoreTel unified communications system is so reliable, flexible, and
easy to configure that it allows me to say 'yes' to the individual call
handling requests that teachers and administrators make," said Maisha-Cole
Perri, technology coordinator at Palisades Charter High School. "This was
impossible with our PBX system because of the time and cost of bringing
technicians to the site. Now I can make the changes myself. With ShoreTel, the
telephone has become an important productivity tool that helps teachers and
administrators do their jobs better."
North Central Texas College
North Central Texas College wanted to tie together its three campuses in a
way that provided all users with advanced telephony features while controlling
local and long-distance service costs. With ShoreTel, the college has reduced
technician training because most maintenance is done via a Web interface to
the ShoreTel switches on any campus.
"We liked ShoreTel's overall system architecture and the ability to do
remote management via a Web interface," said Denise Cason, chief information
officer for North Central Texas College. "I can't tell you how many times we
wished for this level of remote visibility into one of the other campuses'
call systems."
Coleg Glan Hafren,United Kingdom
With four College sites and 600 staff served by an aging and inflexible
managed voice system, Coleg Glan Hafren wanted to reduce the costs of moves,
adds and changes, improve the efficiency of routing calls, and eliminate lost
voicemails. With ShoreTel, Coleg Glan Hafren has realized significant cost
reductions and efficiency gains, and has deployed a communications system that
will support future expansion plans.
"Using ShoreTel's browser-based ShoreWare(R) Director, the system is
extremely easy to manage -- probably the easiest of all the products we looked
at," Gareth Burton, IT manager, Coleg Glan Hafren.
Aberdeen Primary School,New Zealand
With an aging and outdated phone system, staff at Aberdeen Primary School
inHamilton, felt it was time to install a more reliable and robust solution
for its expanding primary school. They were looking for a reliable and
easy-to-use system that could be managed internally unlike the schools older
system that required outside technicians each time a change was needed, which
added to downtime and costs.
"The ShoreTel UC solution provided us with a system that is easy to use
and reliable. We would recommend it to anyone looking for a similar telephony
system. The capacity of the system, and the fact that it is scalable, were
benefits we really felt were imperative. All of our staff loves the ShoreTel
UC solution and unlike our old system I have not heard a negative comment to
date," commented Helen Hogan, Executive Officer ofAberdeen.
About ShoreTel, Inc.
ShoreTel, Inc., (Nasdaq: SHOR) is a leading provider of Pure IP Unified
Communications solutions. ShoreTel enables companies of any size to seamlessly
integrate all communications -- voice, data, messaging -- with their business
processes. Independent of device or location, ShoreTel's distributed software
architecture eliminates the traditional costs, complexity and reliability
issues typically associated with other solutions. ShoreTel continues to
deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction, ease of use and
manageability while driving down the overall total cost of ownership. ShoreTel
is headquartered inSunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in the
United Kingdom,Sydney, Australia andMunich, Germany. For more information,
visit http://www.shoretel.com or call 1-877-80SHORE.
Press Contacts:
Kim Rose
ShoreTel, Inc.
408-331-3357
krose@shoretel.com
SOURCE ShoreTel, Inc.
Copyright © 2009, PRNewswire
Copyright © 2009, NewsBlaze,
Daily NewsTags: ,CPR,STW,TLS,EDU,HED,PSF,CA-ShoreTel-Helps
Search News
Daily News
