IP Telephony Unveiled

IP Telephony Unveiled

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These are some of the possibilities that the hospitality industry is starting to

deploy. The key was the realization that this is more than just a phone. When the

industry’s expectations increased, the discussion with its vendors and partners

moved away from phone features to impacting business initiatives for the hotel.

K–12 Education

Schools are among the earliest adopters of IP telephony, and this sector

continues to raise the bar in terms of business-impacting applications. Although

this might be a bit surprising, it makes sense considering the type of organization

a school actually is:

• A school district is a safe haven where parents send their children for up

to eight hours a day during the business week. Of course, children receive

an education, but they also are supposed to be in a secure environment.

A high emphasis is placed on security. Events in recent years have only

heightened this as a priority.

• A school district is a public transportation system. It provides a

scheduled pick up and delivery of “customers”; in this case, children.

• A school district is a multifranchised restaurant. Each school in the

district has a cafeteria that provides two meals a day for its students.

• Finally, schools must hire and retain excellent college-educated profes-

sionals to educate children, and do all this based on taxes raised and

diminishing government budgets.

Thinking of a school in this context, it is an organization with a number of

challenges most people have never considered. A transportation company has its

own challenges. A restaurant has its own issues to deal with. Combine these two

into a single entity, add the need for a high level of security, the education factor

and diminishing budgets, and you have an organization with significant

challenges.

Chapter 5: Focusing on the Few

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As a result of these challenges, a wealth of new applications exists that are

geared toward helping schools navigate through the daily issues presented to

them. New applications can provide better ways to do the following:

• Notify parents and teachers if buses are running late

• Ensure that progress reports end up in the possession of parents

• Help parents and teachers communicate

• Control student loitering in the halls

IP telephony can address all these issues, and is doing so in many schools

today. It begins with those schools seeing IPT as more than just a phone system.

The electronic hall pass, which was detailed in Chapter 4, “If This Isn’t a

PBX, What Is It?,” helps address the issue of student loitering. However, security

is increasingly becoming a major initiative for public schools, and they are looking

at IP telephony solutions as a means of enhancing security. One example of school

security concerns is the bomb threat.

The bomb threat is a definite reality for public schools today. Two years ago,

a fairly affluent school district in north Texas closed two weeks early for the

summer because of the number of bomb threats they were receiving. School

officials suspect that many of these threats were ruses from students to force the

school to close. Yet, because of recent tragic events involving students, schools can

no longer assume that these calls were merely student pranks.

How can IP telephony help schools deal with this issue? Let’s take the

example of Mrs. Wright, a high-school history teacher in a suburban school

district. The district recently rolled out IP telephony to the classrooms, either in

the form of new IP phones on the teachers’ desks, or in the form of IP SoftPhone

software running on their desktop PC. The teachers are excited because they

finally have the ability to make and place calls from the classroom. In reality, they

have much more.

A call comes in during Mrs. Wright’s free period. During regular teaching

hours, the blocking application would not let any calls come through except from

the main office, unless an emergency occurs in another classroom. In that case, the

teacher calling Mrs. Wright could enter an emergency override that would

supercede the traditional time-of-day blocking feature available for most

classroom environments.