small office phone system

>> well, welcome to another year of educationaltechnology advisory committee town hall meetings. i know almost everybody in the room but forthose of you who i haven't met before or who haven't met me, i'm joe moreau. i'm the vicechancellor of technology for our district and i'm joined with by my colleague sharonluciw who is our director of networking and desktop support for the district to talk aboutour upcoming telephone system replacement which is kind of a big deal and will impactvirtually everybody who works for the district. and we did a town hall meeting like this lastfall to kind of let people know this was coming so this, if you sat through that last fall,probably not a whole lot of tremendously new information but we have some very importantupdates and things will start happening very

quickly in about six weeks or so once therfp closes. so, with that let's dig in. just as a plug for future town hall programs thisis the schedule for town hall meetings for this year. it'll be on the etac website prettysoon so you can look those up here but we've got a whole, long list of topics. i thinkwe might have switched one of these so we'll update it real quick and get that out on theetac website. again, we do typically one of these a month. we do two times at deanza andtwo times at foothill. and as you'll see from our good friend and colleague marty kahn [phonetic]we record these and put them on the district's youtube channel so if you didn't catch somethingor you have a colleague that wasn't able to make it to one of the live sessions you canalways direct them to the district's youtube

channel to find these out. all the topicswe did last year are recorded and on the district youtube channel so you can go and see whatwe talked about last year as well. but, for the telephone replacement system, so whatthis entails is the replacement of our existing telephone system. this is about 15 years old,sharon, give or take? yeah, so it's kind of reached its end-of-life. it's also a kindof old technology in terms of the kinds of things it can do so this will not only entailthe replacement of that hardware but also kind of a major upgrade of the kinds of servicesthat we can provide faculty and staff through the phone system. some of the really importantfeatures that will come through as part of this upgrade is unified messaging, we'll talkabout that specifically in a few minutes,

really good support for mobility. we havea lot more folks who are using this kind of device as their primary device and we'll talkin detail about that and other kinds of things like instant messaging. this is a measurec funded project. it's been on the measure c program for about, well since the beginningof the program and it's now time to do this because we finished some other prerequisiteprojects that now make replacement of the phone system really more viable than before.so, why are we doing this? so as i mentioned a minute ago, our telephone system is beginningto reach end-of-life. now, for those of you who are typical telephone users you probablydon't see a lot of trouble with the phone system. it rarely ever goes down. it's stillpretty reliable but if you were living sharon's

life or lisa hocevar's life you'd know thatthere's a lot of scrambling that goes on behind the scenes from time to time to make surethat that system remains reliable and remains that kind of utility function that when youpick up the handset you hear the dial tone and it just works. we are, the system we havenow is beginning to experience failures. we've had to replace voicemail, right? we've hadto replace even 911 services so if you call for an emergency people know where to findyou so little by little we've had components of it failing. when we bought it some 15 yearsago or so it was really kind of you know, an older product at the time so we've gottenabout as much life out of it as we're going to get. the other challenge that we have isthere's only one maintenance vendor on the

planet [laughter] that supports this systemnow and they're kind of expensive and they're not local and so keeping it maintained ismore of a challenge. we also know that based on kind of modern telecommunication systemsthe services that this particular technology that we have can offer us are really kindof antiquated, that people are looking for a lot more from their telephone system thanjust a dial tone and voicemail. they're looking for things like collaboration and desktopconferencing and emergency alert and notification systems and all kinds of other things thatour current phone system really can't provide for us. so, as i mentioned before we had someprerequisite projects that we had to do before we could really talk about implementing anew phone system and the big one was the refresh

of our data network and sharon and lisa hocevarand their crew finished that. when did we finish that? in august so that was a replacementof all of our network equipment from the core to the closets in buildings and a lot of othercomponents, adding some new security, adding new kinds of intrusion detection systems,things of that sort and that happened, that took about, well about 18 months was the actualimplementation after the design so that's done. and now we have really rock-solid networkinfrastructure throughout the district so being able to bring on a new phone systemthat will inevitably take advantage of a lot of the features of the network is really nowpretty doable. and we also hope to achieve a much more cost-effective approach to maintenancebecause we're really kind of getting bled

dry by the current maintenance vendor so alot of important reasons to do it both to save some money as well as improve serviceto our faculty and staff. so, when will this happen? well, it's been underway for severalmonths. we did spend quite a bit of time with our steering committee and i'll show you whois on the steering committee in a minute, really looking at industry best practices.we wanted to make sure that whatever system we were going to choose really reflected notjust what's happening today in telecommunications but what's going to be happening over thenext three to five years or as far out as we can see so we wanted to make sure thatwe utilized resources to understand what was happening not just in the higher ed spacebut also in other kinds of industries particularly

here in silicon valley to make sure that wewere specifying a system that would really denote best practices in telecommunications.in december and january we'll review those proposals. we may bring vendors on campusfor an interview or demo or discussion, things of that sort if we feel that's necessary.and then we'll finish that evaluation and hopefully have a contract ready to go to theboard of trustees in february, at the february board meeting and as soon as that gets approvedby the board we'll issue a notice to commence work on the contract. so we'll begin startingthat, starting the actual work of deploying a new phone system in february. some of thefirst things that we'll do are really kind of back office stuff, setting up infrastructure,setting up some demo sites that we'll talk

about in a minute and you won't really probablybegin to see things show up in people's desks or offices till maybe the latter part of springi would think, yeah so. who's been involved in the planning? so, we've had a district-widesteering committee made up of folks from the district, from both campuses who have beenreally looking at this pretty intensely over the last couple of months so if you have anyspecific questions about how college input was factored into the plan you could certainlyask me or sharon or follow up with any of the folks on the steering committee but they'vereally held our feet to the fire to make sure that if we're going to do something as extensiveas replacing a phone system that we make sure that we get everything that everybody wantsor as many things as we can afford going forward.

so, i wanted to talk just a minute about how,one of the things that we, how we see people using phones differently. you know we spenta lot of time looking at this as part of the research that we did for the project and throughthe steering committee and with our consultant and really i think what you'll find is thatthe system that we'll bring to the district in the next several months will really reflecta different kind of use of telephones than maybe when i started in higher ed, you know25 years ago, how we used phones then and how we use them now. what we, what we're findingis that folks are asking for different kinds of features and different kinds of servicesas i mentioned before, just dial tone and voicemail is not going to cut it any longer.one of the things that we learned from a lot

of the survey data that we got back as wellas some of the focus groups is that faculty, staff and administrators are much more mobilethan they've ever been so you know when i started my first job in higher education in1990 the work that people did was very focused on a specific space whether it was your deskor your classroom or your laboratory or your office or whatever that kind of space was,that was where all your resources were and that was predominately where you did whatyou did, whatever, whatever your role was, but more and more people are doing what theydo all over the place. they're doing it at home. they're doing it on vacation. they'redoing it travelling to conferences. they're doing it visiting other colleges. they'redoing it from their classroom, from their

laboratory, from their office, from conferencerooms, from all over the place and they need a telephone system that can really reflectthat. so we heard from a lot of people that whatever you're going to do with this phonesystem it needs to be as mobile as we are. so i need to be able to use the phone systemin a place other than the place that's the space, that's designated as my work space.i may, for example, i may want my district phone, i maybe want to make district phonecalls or college phone calls from wherever i happen to be and that's not something thata typical, traditional phone system has been very good at. we also found talking with folksthat lots and lots of people do not have landlines in their house anymore, that this is theirone and only telephone. how many people in

the room today, this is your one and onlyphone? okay, yeah more and more people, the growth of mobile device over landline devicessurpassed, mobile device growth surpassed landline device growth probably three or fouryears ago. so you know we know that people are really focusing more and more of theireffort and their utility on a handheld device, on a mobile device and they want to be ableto include all of the kinds of services that a phone system offers on that type of deviceso that's kind of the direction that we're trying to head in responding to that. we alsoknow that handsets are changing. you know you may, you may recognize this. there's probablystill a few of these around here and there but handsets are becoming more visual andso it's not just an audio device. it's coupled

with other kinds of visual elements for directories,for emergency notifications, for video-based communications, things of that sort so youknow what we really tried to do is look at specifications for a telephone system thatincorporated a lot of different kinds of applications so standard office use because we'll stillhave a lot of that. but we also have division and departmental office use which is kindof different than an individual office space. we have a lot of open areas where people wanttelephones to be available for a whole variety of reasons, student uses included. and ofcourse we've had a lot of folks telling us every single classroom needs to have a telephonein it for lot of reasons, for technical support, for emergencies, for just general convenienceso looking at all of these kinds of things

and incorporating those into the standardswe develop has really caused us to look at having a greater variety and diversity ofhandset options for people to use in a variety of use cases and we'll talk about one specifickind of phone which most people may not be familiar with and that is the soft phone.so what the heck is a soft phone? well, a soft phone is essentially a computer application,an application that sits on your desktop and, come on in, and operates as a telephone soyou can use that in conjunction with a headset or maybe even a desktop camera with a microphonebuilt into it to make telephone calls from your computer. and more and more people arebecoming comfortable with this kind of technology and saying well you know if i had a soft phonei'd carry my laptop with me everywhere i go

so that means i have my phone with me everywherei go if i want to use it. and that's you know essentially what it boils down to. so again,this is an easy way to provide a remote access to the district telephone system and the servicesthat go with that and you know, again it's really easy to utilize with a device thatmany of you carry with you already and just need some kind of headset whether it's wiredor wireless to plug into that. what you see on the screen there is not anything that wenecessarily would buy but this is kind of representative of what does a soft phone looklike? if i have a phone like this installed on my desktop computer, on my laptop, whatdoes it look like and how do i use it? and you'll see it looks pretty much like you knowa standard handset that you would find in

a classroom or in an office but it's juston your computer screen. but it has some other interesting capabilities like the abilityto integrate with your email system and your contacts and things of that sort so it's easyto make phone calls from contact lists or from distributions lists, things of that sortso. support for mobility, again this is something that lots and lots of people have asked usfor and said you know i'm, you talk about an office phone, i'm never in my office i'malways somewhere else and boy it would really be helpful to me if i could connect to myoffice phone wherever i might be. so how can you help me make this phone my office phonewhen i want it to be my office phone? and so that's one of the things that we have builtinto the specifications for this, that people

are bidding on is to help us integrate ourenterprise, our district-wide phone system with cellular devices to the extent that peoplewant that. again, it's not something that you would be forced to use or forced to havebut we want to make sure that if it's something that would be helpful to you, if it's somethingthat would help you use the phone system better, that you have access to it through whatevercellular device you're using whether it's an ios device, an android device, a windows8 device, that you can use this as your district phone if you choose to. we think that willprovide a level of convenience for people that they're interested in. a lot of folkswould also have said you know i'd be happy to use my cell phone to do college or districtbusiness but i don't necessarily want to expose

my personal phone number to lots of differentpeople who i wouldn't normally give that out to. this is a way i think that we'll be ableto help people use, again using your mobile phone, using your cell phone as your districtphone, so really as you use it to do district business or college business, you would beexposing your district phone number which is kind of public knowledge generally. sowe really hope to be able to demonstrate to everybody some really nice features that integratemobile devices that you may already be using to expand the features and functionality ofour enterprise phone system. unified inbox, this is pretty cool. has anybody used a unifiedinbox before? yeah, so if you've used one before, my first experience with a unifiedinbox was in 2001. i worked at miracosta college

down in southern california and we implementeda new phone system and we integrated voicemail and email together and we had gone and donesessions like this and presented to everybody that would give us the time of day to saywe're going to have this new unified inbox and this is how it's going to work and yourvoicemail are going to be right there with your email and it's going to be really cooland you know stay tuned so. the day came. we turned it on and people came back to workon a monday morning and all of a sudden their voicemail were in their, their voicemail messageswere in their email inbox and i had a line of people at my office wanting to thrash meyou know within an inch of my life. you are the biggest idiot on this planet. you, myemail was already so junked up and now you've

put my voicemail in it. what were you thinking?this is the worst idea you've ever had. and i would say to them well, okay, i understandyour confusion and your frustration but you know, give it a couple of days. try it out.if you don't like it come back and tell us and we can separate your voicemail from youremail and it'll go back to the way it was. and they're like well alright i'll try it.every single one of those people came back within a month and said i am so sorry. i amso sorry i came and was so mean to you that day because i tried it and i love it and thisis one of the coolest things we've ever done. so if you've ever used a unified inbox beforeit really can help you do a lot of things. first of all you can listen to your voicemailwhile on your computer along with reading

your email. you can oftentimes respond toa voicemail with an email and say, so sharon might call me up and say, joe i really needthat report for the budget meeting on tuesday. you've got to send it to me. and instead ofme calling her back and saying sorry i'll send that over to you right away, i just replywith an email saying here you go, here's your report. or if it's a voicemail that you needto save for some particular reason, say you've got a student disciplinary issue or some otherkind of sensitive thing happening that you need to preserve that voicemail for some futurereference. it's much easier to file those messages now, to keep those in particularfolders and arrange them in a way that you can retrieve those messages very easily withouthaving to go jump through 57 hoops to preserve

that like many people do in our current voicemailsystem. so there are a lot of advantages to a unified inbox but it does really requirepeople to kind of get used to it and you don't always necessarily want to be playing yourvoicemail through your speakers and having the whole office hear that so you kind ofhave to adjust to, you know how you want to use that but it really, i've been missinga unified inbox for a long time so i'll be really happy to go back to this. and for thoseof you who have tried it before, it really is a nice feature and a very convenient featureand makes it all so much easier particularly when you're travelling. if you're at a conferenceor at an accreditation visit or a meeting in sacramento or anything like this you couldjust pull up one inbox, listen to all your

messages or read all your messages at onetime and not have to go to one place for voice and one place for text et cetera so it's anice convenience. so that'll be part of what we bring out as part of the phone system deployment.so what do you, what do you all need to know? what do our end users need to know about thisproject? so, actually there's not really much that anybody has to do but be on the lookoutfor opportunities so probably at the beginning of or about midway through winter quarteryou think we'll probably publish. hopefully we'll publish an implementation schedule thatwill be on the project website on the ets projects list. so we'll put that out and we'lllet everybody know when that's out there so people can begin to get a feel for, you knowwhen these new services are going to be in

place, when phones are going to, maybe startshowing up in their areas, things of that sort. and so we'll put that implementationschedule out sometime hopefully in february but depending on how quickly we get the contractorup to speed. we'll also be putting together demo sessions for both campuses so you cancome and look at the actual devices that we, you know by this point in time we'll haveselected a manufacturer. we'll know exactly what options are available in terms of, bothtraditional handsets, as well as soft phones, as well as other kinds of headsets, that mightbe both wired and wireless. so we'll set up demo centers for both colleges so people cancome and really kick the tires on these things and try them out and how do they feel ergonomically?hopefully we'll maybe even be able to get

some mobile device set up so people can seehow these things might work on a mobile device. but we want to make sure that everybody hasan opportunity to see the range of options that are available. what will likely happenand again it may happen a little bit differently at both colleges, but will likely happen,is that when we get ready to begin to roll these things out we'll probably roll themout kind of department by department wouldn't you think? you know and you know buildingby building and we'll go to each of the department heads and ask them to give us their list ofuser, well we'll give them the use of users and they can tell us what device each oneof those users will get. so, you know we've tried to set up some kind of default choicesthat we think these kind of users would generally

be happier with a soft phone, these kindsof users might be generally happy with a traditional handset. we tried to develop some generalprofiles based on some of the survey results that we got back from everybody in the springbut ultimately it will be the department heads that will make those choices for all the folksin their area. so if you want to consult with your department head about what device mightsuit you best or work for you the best, after you have a chance to try them out you'll beable to provide your department head with that kind of feedback. but ultimately we'llwork with the deans and the directors and the supervisors, the managers to say for eachdepartment what kind of devices are we going to deploy there? and then i don't think therewill be a huge need for training. i've done

telephone conversions twice now in the last15 years and they were pretty straightforward so i don't know that it's going to be allthat different to operate this system, the voicemail, the unified inbox, the regularphone features. there may be some different things on mobility but what we'll likely dois make available training videos that people can watch at their leisure. it will probablybe provided by the manufacturer. the ones that we've seen so far are pretty good prettyyou know, pretty short you know. people can you know generally figure out how to do that.based upon the feedback that we get from people say in the demo sessions or during some ofthe early implementation if we have to set up workshops for departments or other kindsof in-person training we can certainly do

that. i don't think it will be necessary.i think most people will figure it out pretty easily especially if they watch a couple ofshort videos. i think most people will be able to grasp it pretty quickly but if thereis a need for more concentrated in-person training we can certainly arrange for thatand whether we do it, we meaning ets, whether we do that with our staff or we do that withstaff provided by the contractor or the manufacturer we'll figure out what would work best. buti don't think it's going to be terribly difficult so i think for now mostly what people needto do is keep an eye out for announcements about implementation schedule, about the locationand availability of demo sessions so you can try out devices and then be prepared to havethat conversation within your department about

which way you all want to go with the kindsof end user devices that we'd roll out.