Archive for the ‘Case Studies’ Category

Lake Avenue Church uses unified communications to enhance staff collaboration and improve church
members’ experience.

Founded in 1896 in Pasadena, California, Lake Avenue Church has grown to occupy six multistory buildings on a campus that spans half a city block, plus two nearby residential offices. Approximately 150 staff members and volunteers work together on worship services, educational programs, community and global outreach, and small groups centered around life stages, shared interests, and common needs.

Staff members on the sprawling church campus rely on the communications system to collaborate with each other and communicate with members. When the old private branch exchange (PBX) system began to fail, the IT staff looked for a new communications system.

Lake Avenue Church plans to gradually introduce more features that increase the value of the Cisco Unified
Communications platform. “We give staff a chance to become comfortable with one new feature before we introduce
the next,” says Tulcan. “Cisco Unified Communications is very simple, so new features don’t take long to learn.”
Plans under consideration include:

• Enhanced safety: When someone places a 911 call from any location on campus, the public safetyanswering point receives the building and floor location, not just the church’s main address. “If someone calls from the third floor of our Family Life building, the paramedics don’t have to spend the time to search 240,000 square feet of building space to find the caller,” Tulcan says.
• Emergency preparedness: The church can send pages through the IP phones using InformaCast software from Singlewire Software, a Cisco developer network partner.

Read Full Case Study at http://www.cisco.com.kz/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6788/vcallcon/ps7273/case_study_c36-547629.pdf – PDF

The Los Alamitos Unified School District integrates paging, bells, alarms, text alert messages along with simultaneous broadcast of audio and text to IP phones, IP speakers, desktops, overhead paging systems and much more with Singlewire InformaCast, Cisco, and SchoolMessenger.

Located in the heart of Orange County, California, Los Alamitos Unified School District (LAUSD) has always believed in high standards for its staff, faculty, administrators, and students. District officials rely heavily on collaboration and communication tools to generate quality education and growth potential opportunities to meet the needs of its students. In particular, LAUSD strives to build partnerships with the leading technology providers to supply the support and resources needed for its students to achieve academic excellence and develop unique talents in
preparation for their future goals.

LAUSD had an outdated network and was unable to communicate effectively with key stakeholders, including the parents of its students. With the support of the community, the LAUSD Board of Education implemented a three-year Technology Use Plan to achieve its next level of technology-based curriculum. The plan called for a revamp of the  entire network infrastructure, incorporating a solution that would enable all schools within the district to  communicate general announcements, individual student related information, and emergency broadcasts to parents quickly and efficiently.

LAUSD turned to Cisco and its partners, SchoolMessenger and Singlewire, to accomplish its goals, moving from a decentralized to a centralized solution that provided a robust notification system for all of its schools to utilize across the district.

Download the full press release. – PDF

Read more about the Notifi-Ed Solution from Cisco.

Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) Implements a Singlewire InformaCast Solution as part of a Statewide Emergency Notification System.

Read Written Version | Watch Additional Video Interview Footage

The Challenge

Culmination of comprehensive crisis management planning involved the need for a stable emergency notification system that could access multiple locations quickly and provide continuity in the notification process

The Solution

Implementation of InformaCast paging software that, in conjunction with the Desktop Notification System, and SchoolMessenger, allows contact across campuses through IP phones and speakers, legacy paging systems, computer desktops, SMS text messaging,and email

The Benefits

• Cross-campus, “one-click” notification for speed and consistency of messages
• Control over who can access and send messages, integrated with Active Directory
• Easily scalable to diverse environments
• Able to broadcast to different technologies, including overhead IP speakers, IP phones, desktops, legacy paging systems, and (with SchoolMessenger) email

Read and Watch additional information on this case study.

Transcript from Video

DR. JAY BOX:  Kentucky Community and Technical College System was formed back in 1998.
Today we have grown to sixteen comprehensive community and technical colleges with 67 campuses across the state of Kentucky.

BOB HAMMONDS: There are no dorms at any of our campuses.
We do not have dormitories.
So, all of our students commute.
Several of our students due to the nature of their colleges and remote locations travel up to an hour, an hour and a half each way to attend class on a daily basis.
Five years ago is about the time we started our, our overall crisis management process.
The culmination of this process has been the implementation of a emergency notification system.

DERREL CONE:  We have the ability with our Voice Over IP phone to hit a services button and it brings up a menu and we can choose the message.
This is a pre created, pre recorded, pre scripted message and we can choose that message right there by hitting a button.
And then we can choose what group we want to send it to.
This campus, or that campus, or all of our campuses.
We have the ability right then and there to send that message.
So, if it’s a critical message and  seconds count, we can make it happen.

Snap is the name we’ve given our emergency notification system here at KCTCS.
The system goes immediately to about 8,000 or so Voice Over IP phones.
It can go to desktop computers.
And also we’re tied into a text messaging which gets out thousands of messages in minutes.

InformaCast does what we consider internal messaging.
It sends to the internal phone, the internal PA’s, the internal IP speakers, the desktops on our campus.
SchoolMessager is our external component.
It sends out SMS tags to anybody who have signed up for the SMS tags.
It sends out the emails to anybody who signed up for the emails.
Well when you send out an infomaCast message, we have the script.
And then what that message does is goes out, logs in to the school messenger, runs a pre created job with SchoolMessengerand then does what we asked it for.
We can hit that one button and then it does it all.

BOB HAMMONDS:  It’s something that’s used much more frequent than we anticipated.
We knew we had emergencies and we knew things went on.
But since we’ve implemented the system it has been phenomenal.

DR. JAY BOX:  We have several testimonials from our students talking about what a great concept this has been.
They love the idea of the quick notification.
Plus from the safety prospective it’s, it’s that feeling more secure.
That when an incident does happen, we have a process now in place that can notify our employers and our students in case of that emergency.

BOB HAMMONDS:  One person’s life is worth much, much, much more than what we’ve invested in this system.
The comfort that it gives a person in my role as being Director of Crisis Management for this system is I know we can’t prevent things from happening.
But I feel comfortable at night knowing that if something happens tomorrow we’re going to be able to alert people, let them know what’s going on and potentially save lives.
And for me the cost is . . . the benefits far out weighs any cost we have incurred.

BAA, the world’s leading airport authority, implements InformaCast at London Heathrow Airport.

Transcript of Video

TYVIAN TEMPLE: Within the BAA organization, we have about 900 sort of affiliates that work, that work within this area. That

ranges from you know, small retail outlets through to obviously, the major airlines themselves, BA, BMI, all the normal sort

of faces that you’d expect to see in an airport campus.

NIGEL WARBURTON: BAA have been in the process of replacing their IP network throughout the airport to a new standard that fits

best practice within the whole  marketplace. Full three layer model, lots of security.

EMMA CORNISH: If for instance the package belt goes down or there’s an urgent message that we need to pass across to all

staff, something to do with a particular flight or an issue that has arisen due to weather problems here at London Heathrow or

around the network. We also use it as a communications device to different departments and different staff members around the

terminal itself.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a voice systems point of view specifically, obviously the return on investment has already been apparent

with the Cisco IPT backbone. What it has enabled us to do is create one support model. In the past, the Legacy systems, we had

a dedicated PBX that provided paging and broadcast alongside the main house switch. In the new, and that was two help desks,

two support groups, and two different types of engineers that would come and support it. What we have now is obviously the

converged network, data and voice; we have our Cisco platform, and we have the InformaCast product nestled in that support

model. So we have one help desk, one number, and one set of engineers all trained for each one of those products. Makes it

much easier for the user community and obviously, it saves costs long run for BAA.

NIGEL WARBURTON: Naturally, you know security is a big concern. Having looked through the architecture, you know, separately,

with the InformaCast solution it does provide real security the way it can hop between ports, whether it can hop between

addresses, really does fit quite in my technical space.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a handover point of view, all the areas that we’ve now rolled out InformaCast to who’ve been accepted the

following day with absolutely zero snags to date that relate to the InformaCast product.

EMMA CORNISH: The staff have actually really enjoyed the new product. They enjoyed learning how to use it and also the fact

that it’s a lot better than the old [upstall] that they used to use. So it has been received really well. We didn’t have any

official training on it, but we found that the leaflets on the side of the phone have actually helped the staff with

everything they need to know in order to make or receive any communication calls, and it’s been fantastic.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: A nice product to work is one that goes through the design phase nice and simply. It’s capable of adapting to

some change in user requirements because user requirements at the start of a project and are never the same as they are at the

end; and you need the ability to change things or tweak things. We can provide multiple different types of presentation and

how people use their groups. So, we have one airline that has their groups very much displayed differently because that’s how

they’re used to using that product; where we can standardize all the others. So, it gives us a lot of flexibility. So from my

point of view, a product that can go through design without snags, come out design and go into implementation and be flexible;

and it delivers what it says on the tin, I think the InformaCast product has done that for me, which is really a nice app to

work with.

Brandeis University Implements InformaCast as a part of a Campus-wide Emergency Management Notification System.

Read Brandeis Case Study (PDF)

Brandeis University, a leading university outside of Boston with a total student enrollment of approximately 6,000 and about 1,000 faculty members.

In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, universities across the country were confronted with the need for an improved method of all-campus communication. Brandeis University didn’t waste any time.Their Crisis Communications Team immediately began to seek out the best solution for their campus.

John Turner, Brandeis’ Director of Networks and Systems remembers that parents were asking a lot of questions: “What are you doing for communication? How are you going to let us know? How are you going to let our son or daughter know in case of a crisis? What other mechanisms do you have?”

As additional analysis of the Virginia Tech occurrence became available, reports and assessments pointed to the critical nature of a public address, or PA, system. Brandeis had recently deployed approximately 5,000 Cisco IP phones across the campus. Dormitory rooms, for example, had been equipped with one phone per resident, providing an ideal foundation for PA messaging. For this reason, says Turner, “We pretty much looked at InformaCast from day one.” The Crisis Communications Team realized that with nearly all the major components already in place, they could effectively implement InformaCast with minimal cost and no system disruption.

“The surprise in implementation of the system,” notes Turner, “was the ease of doing it. It was: download the software, get a license key, get a server, point it at our CallManager infrastructure, and we were done. We were up and running in, really, I would say less than
four hours.”

San Ramon Valley Unified School District Saves Time and Money with InformaCast Bell, Clock and PA System

Read Case Study (PDF)

San Ramon Valley Unified School District (SRVUSD) encompasses the California communities of Alamo, Danville, Diablo, Blackhawk, and SanRamon as well as a small portion of the cities of Walnut Creek and Pleasanton. It is comprised of 28 schools serving more than 21,000 students in Kindergarten through Grade 12.

The Situation SRVUSD was experiencing rapid growth and needed to modernize many aging schools. These needs led to the construction of eight new schools and the complete modernization of ten more.

Facing construction cost inflation, SRVUSD was looking for ways to migrate to a district-wide telephone system and improve its school low voltage communications systems without exceeding its already-strained budgets.

To capture substantial cost savings, San Ramon Valley began implementing a ‘one-wire’ solution. They no longer used seperate wires for phone, data, and speaker systems. Rather, they ran the entire infrastructure on ‘one-wire’, providing significant costs savings, easy administration, and a very modern platform that is easy to expand.

The University of Louisville Utilizes InformaCast to Alert Students and Staff of an Emergency Situation on Campus Involving a Firearm.

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