Ohio University’s Office of Information Technology hopes to ring in a new campuswide phone system during the 2012–13 school year, but students and faculty won’t be hearing dial tones anytime soon.
The RFP-labeled Next Generation IP-Based Voice Communications System has the ability to send and receive emails that can be converted to voice. It also supports the ability to receive voice messages that can then be converted to text. However, it is still early in the replacement process, said Sean O’Malley, OIT’s communications manager.
Students and faculty may be able to download a smartphone application or computer software to use the new phone system when they are “mobile.”
“These are the kinds of things that the NextGen phone system could end up supporting,&rdProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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o; O’Malley said. “We won’t know until we piloted it and see what is available and what works, though.”
The pilot, or test phase, which will be held “sometime this year,” will expose the campus to the new phone system. It has not been determined which departments at OU will be part of the pilot, O’Malley said.
“We haven’t made a selection on a system yet, but we have made a letter of intent to Netech and have granted them with a provisional award,” O’Malley said.
This provisional award allows Netech to successfully complete the pilot project, said Brice Bible, OU’s chief information officer.
The Netech Corporation specializes in unified communications, call centers and network foundation to work with businesses to design, deploy and maintain IP-based solutions.
“We will work with Netech and choose a phone system from their offerings,” O’Malley said. “They will help us do a pilot phase and if that goes well, everything will then move forward.”
OIT hasn’t gotten to the pricing point yet for the new system; that will be determined by late fall, Bible said.
“We don’t have a price point at this juncture. We aren’t one hundred percent sure what the configuration will look like,” Bible said. “We will do a pilot project with Netech to determine if the new system will work well in our environment, and my goal is that the system will increase the functionality of the campus but in a low cost as well.”
The current phone system, an Aastra MX-ONE (Ericsson MD110), was installed in the mid-1980s.
“We don’t know what we are doing with the old system,” O’Malley said. “It has yet to be determined.”
After OIT selects a new phone system, the current phone lines in students’ dorm rooms will be removed, Bible said.
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