Frederick County Schools Spell Success with Cisco IP Communications and IP Phone Applications from Cisco Partner AAC Inc.
April 15, 2004
By Cindy McDowell, News@Cisco
Cisco® Premier Certified Partner AAC Inc. has been in business for 20 years and for the last four years has immersed itself in the world of IP telephony. The company, located in northern Virginia, is also a Cisco AVVID® partner. So in additional to designing and deploying IP telephony systems for its federal and local government customers, it also develops XML-based productivity applications that work on top of the Cisco IP Phones.
With its Cisco AVVID partner status, AAC Inc. can take advantage of interoperability testing and co-marketing programs that enable customers to implement verified e-business solutions. The AAC Inc. PhoneTop applications align well with the Cisco AVVID program goals of fostering innovation, driving industry standards, and accelerating integration of business-critical technologies with an open, standards-based network architecture.
"Our PhoneTop® XML applications empower the users of Cisco IP Phones to get the most from their IP telephony network," says Doug Bowlds, vice president for AAC Inc.
School District Replaces Multiple PBX Systems with IP Telephony
A perfect example of this is the work AAC Inc. did for Frederick County Public Schools. Also located in northern Virginia, the district's 11,500 students are served by the 18 Frederick County Public Schools. The district's steady expansion over the years resulted in a jumble of phone systems: 13 different private branch exchange (PBX) systems from five different vendors, and expensive annual maintenance contracts for all of them. The school district turned to Cisco® Premier Certified Partner and Cisco AVVID Partner AAC Inc. to help it deploy one telephone system for the entire district that it could administer itself, and have the technology infrastructure for future expansions.
"We have differentiated ourselves by developing and selling IP telephony applications that go on top of Cisco IP Communications solutions," says Bowlds, "Many people are unaware that these IP phones provide anything besides a dial tone. We originally developed some applications to show during pitches to demonstrate the XML capabilities of the phones - which enable users to access all manner of data from the screen on a Cisco IP phone - and to add value to our proposals." Today, AAC Inc. is winning business because of the value its PhoneTop applications deliver. Frederick County Public Schools was one of its first education clients, and a big reason AAC Inc. won the business was its IP telephony experience and its ability to provide an application that would enable teachers to take classroom attendance and deliver that attendance data to the office via their IP phones. Bowlds estimated that the attendance application would save school secretaries two hours each day.
Security and Storm Convince District to Upgrade Its Communications
Two big events, a state security audit and a snowstorm, convinced Frederick County Public Schools that it was time to re-think its communications technology. First, the security audit showed that three schools did not have two-way communications from the classrooms to the school office.
"This was a situation we had to address for the safety of our students and the teachers," says Robert Yost, director of information technology for Frederick County Public Schools. "In addition, a big snowstorm revealed another valuable lesson." During the storm, school buses had already delivered some students to school, and others were in transit when the administration cancelled school for the day. Parents calling the schools to verify the closures and find their children overwhelmed the phone systems and most callers got a busy signal. Worse yet, administrators at the central office could not reach some of the schools. Yet the data WAN remained online during the storm. This got the attention of Yost and his team, but the district suggested installing a two-way public address system to address the classroom safety issue.
"They were ready to run twisted pair for a two-way speaker to every classroom," said Yost. "But we already had Category-5 Ethernet wiring in all the buildings. We suggested taking advantage of the existing wiring to save both time and money." Yost was already sold on IP telephony and his group had specified that a Cisco IP Communications solution was the best fit for the school's needs.
"We spoke with a total of four organizations, and AAC won our business because of the services it could provide with its PhoneTop applications," says Yost.
"We were really pleased we could help Frederick County Schools reuse their existing data infrastructure," says Bowlds. "With the fiber backbone already in place, they basically had a metropolitan area network that linked back to the headquarters building. We introduced a Cisco IP Communications solution - including Cisco Call Manager call processing software, Cisco IP Phones, and Cisco Unity unified messaging and voicemail software into the headquarters and drove that out to all of the schools. Each classroom was already wired for Ethernet and had at least one drop, so we could use that drop to bring a Cisco IP Phone into every classroom."
School Session Allows Only Small Deployment Window
"Frederick County Schools was our first education customer, so we learned a lot," says Bowlds. "But we had recently deployed a Cisco IP Communication solution with 4,500 phones for the U.S. Navy. We take the best practices we learn from each deployment and apply them to new jobs." The AAC Inc. team learned that one of the biggest challenges in working with education sector is the small window available for deployment. In order to keep classroom disruption to an absolute minimum, the deployment time was limited to a few days at the end of summer before the fall session of school started.
"There was enormous upfront work to do in order to meet the tight deployment schedule," says Bowlds. "There was the dial plan, survey of the schools, verifying cabling, making sure portable classrooms could accommodate the technology. We brought in our A team and got it done." Another challenge was overcoming some resistance to learning the new phones.
"We actually run into this a lot," says Bowlds. "The Cisco IP Phones are very intelligent and, for instance, there are six different ways to start a call on the 7960 model. This can be a little intimidating. Plus the teachers needed to learn the attendance application on top of it. A few teachers picked up the technology very quickly and were great about helping their colleagues with it, and soon all of the teachers were thrilled with the capabilities of their new phones."
XML Applications for Cisco IP Phones Add Value to School's Investment
The first AAC PhoneTop application that the school district made available to users of the new Cisco IP Phones was the attendance application. Taking attendance at the schools used to involve teachers marking down absent students on cards and then someone from the office physically walking around and collecting the cards from each classroom. Then a secretary in the school office would spend nearly two hours cross-checking the absent-student cards with the office records of parents who had called in to report an absence, and entering the information into a database. Students whose absences were unexcused then received a phone call at home. This process used to take the secretary two hours or more every day.
With the PhoneTop application, each teacher can send a full attendance report directly to the office.
"Now we know by 8:15 in the morning exactly which students have excused and unexcused absences, and the phone calls home to inquire about unexcused absences are made hours earlier," says Yost. "It's saved us a lot of time on data entry, we no longer have to purchase cards stock, and the school secretaries can spend their time on other important school business." In addition to the timesavings, the district is enjoying better records, increased security, and improved communications between parents and teachers. Yost is already excited about new PhoneTop applications he can deploy on the district's Cisco IP Phones, such as a hall pass application that will do away with hand-written hall passes, and AAC's AMBER Alerts application which sends missing child information to the IP phones.
Cindy McDowell is a freelance journalist based in Santa Cruz, CA.
