Butler County, Ohio

Strategically located in Ohio between Cincinnati and Dayton, Butler County is at the center of a population of 2.8 million people. Twelve Fortune 500 companies and seven Fortune 1000 companies are headquartered in the Cincinnati-Dayton region, and a total of 40,000 working scientists and engineers live within a 50-mile radius of the county. Butler County services include a sheriff’s office, a clerk of courts,  an engineering office, and other services, including those provided specifically for the state of Ohio.

“We needed a more cost-effective phone system with more features so that we could improve county communications and end-user productivity.”
- Tom Line, Network Engineer, Butler County.

Butler County was using an NEC phone system that was costly to maintain and utilized outdated technology. At the time, the county was also in the process of moving one of its sites — a remote real estate office that provides property appraisals — so the organization’s network team decided that the time had come to replace its NEC PBX with an IP-based unified communications system.

 “Our goal was to try and get a system that would help us be more responsive to callers and send fewer of those calls into voicemail.”
- Tom Line, Network Engineer, Butler County.

A thorough evaluation of competing systems included viewing demonstrations, talking to customer references, and testing products in their own facility. Convinced of ShoreTel’s reliability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and ease of management, the county also valued how the system’s open, distributed architecture would permit them to transition from the old phone system in phases. Now, even though the county’s new system is a combination of IP and PBX equipment, it still looks and behaves like a single, unified platform and can be managed in a Web-based interface from any point on the network. Other benefits include:

• Seamless integration with the county’s legacy system allowed for a quick transition; the initial deployment was completed in just one afternoon.
• Powerful features like Follow Me Find Me allow employees to have calls track them down wherever they are — at their desk, on their mobile devices, or even at home.
• Tight integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^® allows employees to manage their email and voicemail centrally and efficiently right from their desktop.
• Efficiencies are increased with powerful, easy-to-configure tools such as auto-attendant, allowing one operator to handle more calls, even during peak periods such as tax time.

“ShoreTel just plain does what it’s supposed to do, and now we’re able to easily manage the system in-house. ShoreTel really let their engineers think 'out of the box' and they have built a landmark product.”
- Tom Line, Network Engineer, Butler County.