Elgin Community College

Founded in 1949 and located midway between Chicago and Rockford in the Fox River Valley, Elgin Community College’s main campus is easily accessible from U.S. 20 and Interstate 90 in southwest Elgin. Including 12 buildings on a picturesque 145-acre campus, the college employs more than 1,000 faculty and staff and is responsible for educating a growing population of roughly 17,000 students.

“I have a lot of experience with Cisco and I was very impressed with the simplicity of ShoreTel. We have Cisco equipment at the college, but we still liked ShoreTel.”
— Michael Chahino, Director of Network Operations and Information Security, Elgin Community College.

In late 2007, Elgin Community College determined that its twenty-year-old Avaya PBX-based telephone system was too unreliable and insufficient to support the college’s growth. The college’s priority list for the new system included reliability, simplicity, and a full set of unified communications tools.

“ShoreTel gave us a demo and we liked the system’s simplicity. It looked like it would work well in our environment. I was an Avaya technician for many years, but when Avaya did their presentation, the system couldn’t match ShoreTel’s ease of administration.”
— Bud Miedema, Telecommunications Specialist, Elgin Community College.

The college's new unified communications system was deployed with the help of its integration partner, Oak Park, Illinois-based WanCom. ShoreTel provided 15 ShoreTel 120 and five ShoreTel T1 Voice Switches, as well as two voicemail servers — one serving as backup for the other. Eventually, more than 1,000 ShoreTel IP Phones were deployed across its two locations. The college uses ShoreTel Director, a browser-based management interface, for easy access to management of the system from anywhere on the network. Other benefits include:

• ShoreTel Core Software includes a powerful voice messaging system including user-configurable call handling options and find-me routing. The voice messaging system can be accessed visually from ShoreTel Call Manager or the user’s Microsoft^® Outlook^®  inbox.
  Elgin Community College is also using ShoreTel’s hunt group capability to ensure all calls are answered by a live person rather than by voicemail.
• The college benefits from ShoreTel’s N+1 redundancy, which improves reliability and saves money by efficiently using its hardware and software.
• ShoreTel Workgroups enables the creation of groups for registration, records, and student accounts, so incoming calls go to the next available agent. Basic reporting capabilities help supervisors direct resources where they are needed.

“We’ve had so many comments from various people about how much the ShoreTel system helps them do their jobs better.”
— Bud Miedema, Telecommunications Specialist, Elgin Community College.