Worcester Academy

Worcester Academy is a co-educational school that enrolls 650 children from around the world, and offers a diverse and complete educational curriculum for its middle school and upper school students, together with a boarding program. To fulfill its educational mission, Worcester Academy needed to move from an end-of-life NEC 2000 PBX system and worn analog cabling to a cohesive communications structure that would unite 11 buildings across the school’s campus.

“The old system was reaching a point of archaism—we were limited in our telephony options and even the cabling was deteriorating. The time to renovate our communications infrastructure was now.”

— Drew Forsberg, Director of IT, Worcester Academy.

Among the project’s priorities were to ensure campus safety by installing telephones in all key locations on campus, including classrooms and dormitories, and erecting call boxes. The academy also sought to extend beyond traditional PBX offerings with VoIP to gain greater cost efficiencies and tools for communicating with features such as emergency calling from any phone into a central service and Web-based paging capabilities. The caveat for any solution selected was the ability to install the new system without having to take the legacy system offline.

“We had only weeks to select, validate and deploy a communications system before school commenced, and considered solutions from Cisco, ShoreTel and a hosting company…We had confidence in our vendor and the speed of deployment of the ShoreTel system.”

— Drew Forsberg, Director of IT, Worcester Academy.

The non-centralized infrastructure includes five ShoreTel Voice Switches across the 11 buildings to support reliable communication with 170 ShoreTel IP Phones, model 230. The solution’s fully distributed and redundant architecture, with no single point of failure ensures high availability of systems throughout the campus. The ShoreTel Emergency Notification Application and ShoreTel Enhanced Paging Application extend the system’s native functionality to generate and automate crucial alerts and batched calling. Benefits include:

• Easy-to-deploy and -manage IP solution eliminates the need for both expensive recabling and additional personnel to manage the new phone system.
• The school administration is able to receive real-time audible notifications on desktops and phones whenever a 911 call is initiated anywhere on campus.
• The school now has all the tools and support necessary to integrate its predominantly Mac computing environment with the phone system. Integration will simplify communications, and add to the existing cost efficiencies of the ShoreTel solution.

“Before deploying ShoreTel, we had to dedicate one staff member to just handling the phone system. The ShoreTel system is so reliable that I am able to roll that responsibility into the course of my own day and reassign staff elsewhere.”

— Drew Forsberg, Director of IT, Worcester Academy.