Tiger Woods Foundation and Learning Center

Through the Tiger Woods Foundation, the Anaheim, California-based Tiger Woods Learning Center (TWLC) seeks to get students thinking about the role education plays in their futures. In a 35,000-square-foot facility that uses the latest technology in a completely wireless environment, the center offers exciting courses that focus on careers in math, science, technology, and language arts.

“Our internal communications have improved immensely using the ShoreTel system. Everybody who works here — teachers, volunteers, technicians — needs to move around to different classrooms and with the mobility features of ShoreTel, they don’t have to worry about missing calls or messages. We are very happy ShoreTel customers, and the entire experience has been nothing but positive.”
— Kathy Bihr, Executive Director, TWLC.

The Tiger Woods Foundation and its programs were moving to a new building and needed to replace an outdated Panasonic PBX-based telephone system in order to improve internal and external communications, boost productivity, and to deliver on its mission to serve students. Impressed with the ShoreTel system’s ability to address its priorities, TWLC began working with a leading technology integrator in the education space to help deploy the system at the new Learning Center campus. After hearing about the great things going on through the Tiger Woods Foundation, ShoreTel and the technology integrator decided to donate the entire IP phone system to the TWLC.

“Setting up the phone system couldn’t have gone more smoothly than the ShoreTel deployment. The entire system took just one day to install and was easy to learn and teach.”
— Kathy Bihr, Executive Director, TWLC.

ShoreTel provided the TWLC with a ShoreTel 60 and a T1 Voice Switch, plus 40 ShoreTel IP Phones. The following year, the implementation of one ShoreTel 120 and one T1 Voice Switch, and an additional 30 ShoreTel IP Phones brought the Tiger Woods Foundation onto the system. The TWF and TWLC rely on ShoreTel’s hunt groups capability to ensure that calls are answered by a person, and not by voicemail. Other benefits include:

• ShoreTel's open, distributed platform provides reliability as well as the full-featured unified communications tools that TWF and TWLC require.
• The system’s powerful routing and workgroups features enable both the TWF and TWLC to be more responsive to phone calls, to streamline internal communications, and to leverage their existing resources better.
• A built-in suite of versatile, real-time tools enhance productivity by putting flexible features, telephony and IM control, and collaboration services at employees’ and volunteers’ fingertips.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity across as many sites as needed, and can be managed from anywhere on the network with the Web-based interface of ShoreTel Director.

“Our internal communications improved immensely within just a couple of months using the ShoreTel system.”
— Kathy Bihr, Executive Director, TWLC.