Lessons learned killing PBX

When Marquette University started construction on three campus buildings a year and a half ago, the IT department saw it as a good time to deploy VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) from the ground up.

The delivery of voice

The delivery of voice and multimedia over the Internet has cost-saving advantages over running PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) systems that are connected to a public telephone network. And by switching to a SIP architecture to enable VoIP, Milwaukee-based Marquette has cut telecom operational costs in half, from $240,000 to $120,000 a year.

Marquette's plan was to tap into VoIP for its staff and faculty and replace its Siemens PBX phones with unified communications suites that include voice, videoconferencing, instant messaging and presence.

Initially, Marquette assumed Cisco would be its unified communications vendor considering that the university uses Cisco gear for its networking.

"We did test out CallManager [Cisco's VoIP software product] with some phones," says Dan Smith, Marquette's Senior Director of IT Services. "However because of our established Microsoft ecosystem and our campus agreement with them, the licensing costs for OCS R2 [Lync's predecessor] were a lot cheaper than Cisco."

Currently, the entire Marquette campus has access to Lync for IM and dial-in audio conferencing, now 1,000 faculty and staff members as well have videoconferencing and voice-enabled IP telephony and their Siemens PBX desk phones have been removed.

Faculty and staff using Lync for voice nevertheless have phones, however they are VoIP-based phones from Polycom that use Lync or rather than a PBX system as the call manager.

The way users communicate

There's no question that unified communications technologies alter the way users communicate, resulting in a culture change that not all users will greet with open arms, says Smith.

"Some groups have embraced Lync. They love how it reroutes your office number to Lync and allows you to work at home when you need to," says Smith. "However for others the attitude is, 'give me a phone and go away -- I don't want to use any of this fancy stuff.' It depends on the department and how they want to use Lync."

"You'll see more videoconferencing in the fund raising department because they have remote offices," says Smith. "Some faculty are using it in the classroom, and business school students will use it to do their first round of job interviews to put it more exactly than fly to New York."

Smith recommends running unified communications like a project, rolling it out building by building and having IT people in place to make sure the process runs smoothly.

After Marquette had terminated its Siemens PBX phones -- now before rolling out Lync -- users had VoIP-based Polycom phones that worked with OCS R2.

People with older Polycom phones -- button-less devices with a USB connection -- were forced to use the soft client to make calls and many users felt overwhelmed by the abrupt shift, says Smith.

But users with newer Polycom phones had an easier time moving to Lync because the 600's have an LCD screen with a keypad, menu, speakerphone and calendaring features.

The newer Polycom VoIP phones look

"The newer Polycom VoIP phones look and act like regular phones," says Smith, "and it's important for people to after all have a normal phone as a fallback when moving to a soft client like Lync."

"One-touch dialing," says Smith. "You click on a person however, and people are getting used to not knowing anybody's phone number or extension anymore."

Shane O'Neill covers Microsoft, Windows, Operating Systems, Productivity Apps and Online Services for CIO.com. Follow Shane on Twitter @smoneill. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Shane at soneill@cio.com

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