Hertford Regional College

Hertford Regional College (HRC) is the largest college in its region and offers the widest range of courses available in the area. Based in Broxbourne and Ware just north of London, HRC was originally formed from the merger of Ware College and East Herts College in the early 1990s.

Since then, HRC has grown in size, currently employing 1000 staff and serving more than 18,000 full- and part-time students.

“When we hooked ShoreTel Mobility to our Cisco wireless network we could see how the solution could give us both the cost reduction and coverage we were looking for.”

— Daniel Hidlebaugh, Director of Network Services, Hertford Regional College

The Hertford Regional College’s community of faculty, staff and students had long anticipated the completion of the college’s $140 million construction project to update its campus buildings. The state-of-the art facilities, which include new four-story and two-story buildings that cover more than a city block on each of the main campuses, delivered very “Green” buildings and IT infrastructure through the largest rollout of Microsoft’s Hyper-V in Europe.

With the grand opening of the facilities in early 2009, the college community began to benefit from the updated buildings. But all was not entirely well in the new facilities for the college’s vast mobile population. As college officials quickly learned, the new building materials did not allow for cellular coverage indoors, plus the college was already spending approximately $6,000 a month in mobility cellular charges.

“Handover between indoor Wi-Fi and outdoor cellular is very slick, and ShoreTel Mobility proved interoperable with all our infrastructure, including Microsoft Unified Messenger voicemail. It works seamlessly on mobiles acting as extensions from Cisco Call Manager, providing all the features as if users were on a desk phone. It is exactly what we were looking for.”
— Daniel Hidlebaugh, Director of Network Services, Hertford Regional College

College staff worked with reseller Convergis to evaluate ShoreTel’s mobile convergence product (formerly Agito) and identify how to lower mobility costs and reduce the number of cellular minutes needed in their T-Mobile carrier contract. The numbers revealed that ShoreTel Mobility could help the college could cut cellular expenses in half and realize a full return on investment in a relatively short time. Benefits include:

• Cellular coverage both inside and outside of buildings has improved staff accessibilty, whether on campus or at home.
• Reduced spending on telephony by about 50 percent.
• Improved productivity through presence information that helps manage resources on the go

“The nice thing about ShoreTel Mobility is that it works as advertised, and it does what they say it will. With a lot of technologies, you have to fight to make it work. With ShoreTel Mobility, it’s clean and it works.”

— Daniel Hidlebaugh, Director of Network Services, Hertford Regional College