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Unified Communications Featured Article
December 10, 2007
ShoreTel Unified Communications Keeps Oakland Connected
By ShoreTel (News - Alert), a provider of Pure IP
unified communications solutions, announced it has worked with the City of Oakland to expand its deployment of the ShoreTel IP telephony system to 2000 phones. ShoreTel was deployed in Oakland back in March 2005, and is currently being used to improve productivity and reliability, even during natural disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, and mudslides, and to streamline the overall communications process.
unified communications solutions, announced it has worked with the City of Oakland to expand its deployment of the ShoreTel IP telephony system to 2000 phones. ShoreTel was deployed in Oakland back in March 2005, and is currently being used to improve productivity and reliability, even during natural disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, and mudslides, and to streamline the overall communications process.
As there is no single point of failure, Shoretel is able to provide a robust distributed architecture, which is well-suited to rapid failover and the re-routing of calls around problem areas. ShoreTel is more reliable than server-centric solutions, as its call control software is distributed to each voice switch in a geographically dispersed deployment. For the city of Oakland, this has two advantages: first, calls can be easily rerouted and communications can be kept open even when a call switch is destroyed. Secondly, it eliminates any single point of failure.
of calls around problem areas. ShoreTel is more reliable than server-centric solutions, as its call control software is distributed to each voice switch in a geographically dispersed deployment. For the city of Oakland, this has two advantages: first, calls can be easily rerouted and communications can be kept open even when a call switch is destroyed. Secondly, it eliminates any single point of failure. “Our ShoreTel IP unified communications system has proven to be easy to configure and use, simple to manage, flexible, and extremely reliable. Our employees are very pleased with how ShoreTel’s unified communications features have helped them be more productive and communicate more efficiently,” said Robert Glaze, Oakland’s CTO. “And with our history of natural disasters, the distributed architecture and automatic failover of the ShoreTel system has been a perfect fit for us. It will keep our communications up and running even if we have to relocate several departments to temporary facilities.”
Oakland has, indeed, seen enough natural disasters to warrant such a technically advanced system. After it selected ShoreTel and deployed 500 phones in 2005, the city found the system to highly reliable and expanded the deployment to 2,000 phones in eight locations. ShoreTel’s desktop call control client, ShoreWare Personal Call Manager, integrates with Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook to provide employees contact screen pop, directory dialing, and calendar integration.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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