University of Miami (UM) is no small rural college. In fact the University boasts over 10,000 full- and part-time faculty and staff across multiple campus locations. Add in the over 15,000 undergrads and graduate students and you start to approximate a small city or at least a very large company, in terms of the University’s telecommunications and messaging needs.

 

Just over two years ago, it became clear that UM was on the verge of outgrowing its aging legacy PBX and overtaxed voicemail system. What’s worse, the PBX (News - Alert) manufacturer announced that it was ‘end-of-lifing’ the system forcing UM to seek an alternate solution.

 

After some shopping, University of Miami selected Interactive Intelligence’s (News - Alert) Messaging Interaction Center (MIC). According to UM Chief Security and Network Officer, Stewart Seruya, the reasons for choosing the MIC were many, and included an architecture designed for distributed environments, flexible deployment options, centralized administration, and a diverse feature set.

 

According to Seruya, “Our users loved it for its multimodal access with voice mail boxes that gave them the ability to listen and view their faxes through a Web browser. And our IT group loved it for its intuitive Web-based administrative interface, ease-of-configuration and customization, and ability to incrementally scale.”

 

The solution especially comported itself well as a voicemail replacement solution for UM.

 

MIC supports about 10,000 voice mail boxes with unified messaging, including the ability to view faxes and listen to messages through a Web browser. Since deploying MIC, UM is enjoying a number of benefits, including cost savings and increased productivity.

 

“Our users absolutely love the ability to listen to voice mail messages via a Web browser, or whatever e-mail system they happen to use,” Seruya said. “By not having to check for messages in different places, and by being able to access messages wherever they are, our employees are more responsive, thus more productive.”