The University of Illinois is in the final stages of a major renovation in the way it offers its communications systems. They'll be going from a variety of disparate strategies to a unified communications front, and with this major change, will be reaping a substantial amount of benefits and cost savings as well.

The University of Illinois' new unified communications system runs on a combination of Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange and Microsoft Lync, and allows for all the crucial communications systems—e-mail, voice messaging, instant messaging, and calendars--to all be routed into each employee's computer. This in turn provides a wide array of useful features for the users, like the ability to schedule and join conference calls with just a mouse click, or caller ID systems that show who's calling and what their callback number is in a big monitor window, not in a tiny LCD slit on a phone.

While there are also a huge amount of extra features associated with the move to unified communications, the cost savings to the University of Illinois could not be understated. The University projects that, every year, they'll save fully $3 million dollars by making things more compressed and easier to deal with, as well as likely saving a good amount of money by not paying the various taxes and fees associated with landline phone service.

However, the transition has been neither easy nor foolproof. The change-over process has been in the works for months, and last week employee landlines were to be shut down and their phone numbers ported to the Lync voice over Internet tool. Trying to get enhanced 911 services to work with the system was also reportedly difficult, and there are some issues related to getting the various Microsoft-built systems up and running on Macs, since Microsoft software is more geared to run on PCs, so some small glitches have occurred in the process. Privacy concerns are also cropping up, as well as issues of basic stability, so the system isn't foolproof, at least not yet.

While there are some problems, and simply some things that take some getting used to, involved in most any large-scale technological migration, the potential benefits involved are too good to pass up, especially in an economic environment like the one currently faced by most businesses, universities included. The rollout will hopefully continue on solidly, and then the University of Illinois can serve as an example to the rest of us of just how to make a technology migration work.