Sinclair Community College

Sinclair Community College encompasses five remote campuses covering a forty-mile radius from its Dayton, OH, campus, and serves more than 27,000 commuter students. The largest regional provider of online education, its mission is to provide accessible, high-quality, affordable learning opportunities. Of the nearly 37,000 calls it handles during peak registration periods, most concern financial aid and require the expertise of agents with very specific training. As the economy drives more people to move toward new careers and qualifications, Sinclair expects peak call rates to top 46,000 in 2010.

“We started well ahead of time to consider what we wanted. And, first and foremost, we wanted IP technology, a platform that was scalable, and functionality that was easily configurable to our operations.”
- Scott McCollum, Director of Information Technology Services, Sinclair Community College.

In 2002, Sinclair’s legacy Fujitsu PBX manufacturer went out of business. Although the PBX system met current needs, college staff recognized that the system ultimately needed replacement. With a knowledgeable IT staff active in organizations such as the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA), which has a well-established VoIP special interest group, Sinclair was well prepared to evaluate VoIP and IP-PBX solutions against the specific needs of higher education settings. After talking to Accent Information Systems, a ShoreTel reseller, two IP-based communication systems made it to Sinclair’s short list.

“With ShoreTel, everything we installed initially could scale and integrate, regardless of which sites we implemented first.”
- Scott McCollum, Director of Information Technology, Sinclair Community College.

Finding ShoreTel’s distributed architecture ideal for unifying multiple sites on a single phone system, the college launched the first phase of a ShoreTel implementation at its Englewood Learning Center in early 2006. The system's scalability allowed the college to add other sites as resources became available, creating a system that currently consists of 1,300 ShoreTel IP Phones, 900 analog phones, and 63 ShoreTel Voice Switches — models 24A, 120, and 220 — across the main campus and five satellite campuses. Benefits include:

• ShoreTel’s open, distributed architecture allows Sinclair Community College to build on -- rather than replace -- existing investments as the college expands across sites and locations.
• ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center features help callers to reach the right people quickly. Reporting tools help the college to direct resources where they are most needed, increasing overall productivity.
• A built-in suite of versatile, real-time tools enhance productivity by putting flexible features, telephony and IM control, and collaboration services at the fingertips of faculty and staff.
• The system's plug-and-play scalability and ease of maintenance contribute to its low overall total cost of ownership, which is essential for any educational institution.

“Our ShoreTel implementations are routine — there’s never any disruption.”
- Dennis Hess, Voice Telecomm Administrator, Sinclair Community College.