[August 19, 2003]

Seattle School District Chooses Avaya IP Office

Avaya announced that the administrative offices of Highline School District, located south of Seattle in Washington State, have chosen an Avaya IP Office to dramatically reduce telephony costs and stay in closer touch with the parents of the 17,000 students it serves.

Driving the need for change were the eight different phone systems Highline administrators used, resulting in incompatibilities that often required employees to use an outside phone line to talk to each other. Voice mail systems were incompatible and hard to access, maintenance was expensive, and above all, the systems were impeding communication with parents.

With the new system in place, Highline employees no longer use outside lines for internal dialing, allowing the district to make dramatic reductions in the number of phone lines serving its administrative facility and to recover the cost of the Avaya system in about a year. The built-in conferencing capabilities of Avaya IP Office have multiplied those cost savings even further, eliminating the need for an outside teleconferencing service.

“We serve an earthquake-prone area,” said district telecommunications manager Dave Collins. “That means we needed a system that could help us manage the high volume of calls we receive from parents during times of emergency.”

“Before, department relocations in particular were a nightmare,” Collins said. “After installing IP Office, we relocated our entire HR department and were able to do in a half-day what would have taken a week to do before.”

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]