Pennsylvania-based Harrisburg Academy employs 100 faculty members, all of whom struggled with the school’s outdated legacy phone system. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, and scaling the system was next to impossible, with a maxed-out paging system that resulted in a third of users missing announcements.
THE CHALLENGE
Not only was the system costly to maintain, operate and repair, but the school had grown beyond the capabilities that their legacy phone system had the architecture to support. With cost considerations and convenience front of mind, Bob Bell, Harrisburg Academy’s Director of Information Technology Services, knew the time had come to modernize its telephony system.
THE SOLUTION
Harrisburg Academy considered several other digital systems, but eventually opted to work with 3CX for a number of reasons. 3CX’s VoIP solutions will help the school mitigate the need for ongoing maintenance; it operates on a Windows platform that is widely recognizable by the faculty and will drastically cut its telephony costs.
With the support of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based 3CX partner Jomar Technologies, the installation of Harrisburg Academy’s 3CX Phone System was installed and deployed within just a few short hours. Because 3CX runs on mainstream operating systems, it integrated rapidly with the school’s existing hardware and software, with no special training required for Harrisburg Academy’s IT staff in order to get the new system operational.
“With our old system, phone changes and moves were a nightmare of tangled wire rats nests and slow, archaic programming codes. Our hardware was past obsolete and repair parts were reported to be in very short supply. The paging system was maxed-out at 64 phones, but we had 94. All-page was only heard on the first 64, a serious compromise to our security system. It had difficult-to-use features. For instance, no one used conference calling because it was too hard to set up. Our 3CX phone system moved us out of the 1980s and into the modern world of integrated voice and data.” Bob Bell, Director of Information Technology Service, Harrisburg Academy
HEAD OF THE CLASS INSTALLATION
The impact of integrating 3CX telephony solutions into Harrisburg Academy yielded immediate and substantial improvements throughout the school. Maintenance costs and time considerations were immediately slashed—the school anticipates a 60-percent decrease in the time IT personnel must dedicate to maintenance. The cost of the school’s SIP trunk and the cost of adding new lines was cut in half.
Administrators were particularly impressed with the new system’s modern features, including click-to-call, convenient conferencing and interoperability with Windows Outlook. The school is now rolling out a program to provide 3CX on the phones of personnel to enable them to mobilize, helping them to offer better customer service to parents and the school community at large.
