Hoover City Schools

City School District Saves $150,000 in Maintenance Costs with Unified Messaging

Hoover City Schools in Alabama wanted a solution that would give its faculty and staff more flexible ways to communicate as well as replace its current voice-mail system. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner TekLinks, the school district deployed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with unified messaging in August 2007 and has begun to deploy Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 for instant messaging and conferencing. By replacing its previous voice-mail system, the district saved U.S.$150,000 in maintenance costs. All faculty and staff now have access to voice mail and e-mail through one system, making them more accessible to their students’ parents. The streamlined messaging environment frees the IT department from having to maintain separate systems, so the IT staff can engage in other projects to improve the district’s technology infrastructure.

Situation

Hoover City Schools in Jefferson County, Alabama, has been in operation for more than 20 years. Having started with one high school, one middle school, and five elementary schools, the district now has 16 schools and approximately 12,500 students. Each school year, about 350 new students join the district, which employs approximately 1,700 faculty and staff.

The return on investment for Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging was instantaneous. We saved $150,000 this year in maintenance costs.  Keith Price Chief Technology Officer Hoover City Schools

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools recently named Hoover City Schools a “Super System for Quality Schools.” Expansion Management Magazine named it a “Gold Medal School District,” placing it in the top 16 percent of all school districts nation¬wide. The number of National Board Certified Teachers at Hoover City Schools ranks it in the top three Alabama school systems.

The district has a forward-thinking approach to using technology to connect teachers, staff, students, and parents. A growing number of classrooms contain digital projection systems that can capture lesson content for uploading to the Web. Teachers carry mobile devices that can transmit assignments to students’ computers, and elementary school students are learning to read and write using Tablet PCs. Parents and teachers can share and review learning materials, classroom assignments, and other documents through a Web portal built on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

For four years, Hoover City Schools used a voice-mail system that was integrated with Cisco CallManager, the call-processing component of the Cisco IP telephony product. As time went on, the district became interested in deploying a unified messaging solution to make e-mail and voice mail available through a single system.

“We wanted to give our staff a way to communicate better internally with their peers, and externally with parents,” says Keith Price, Chief Technology Officer at Hoover City Schools. “The systems that we were using provided pieces of what we needed, but the overall solution was inefficient because it contained multiple points of access for messaging needs. Employees had to check one system for voice mail, another for e-mail, and another for instant messaging. People had to learn several different applications and maintain different passwords and user names.”

Hoover City Schools needed a solution that would meet its budgetary needs and be easy for faculty and staff to use. The solution would also have to be easy to deploy: The schedule of the school year meant that the district had a narrow window of opportunity in which to get the new system up and running before the yearly influx of new students consumed all of its resources.

Solution

The district’s deadline to renew its existing voice-mail maintenance agreement coincided with the planning phase of a project to migrate the Hoover City Schools e-mail system from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. When Price attended the Microsoft U.S. Public Sector CIO Summit in March 2007, he spoke with the district’s Microsoft account manager about the district’s messaging needs. The account manager suggested that Hoover City Schools take advantage of Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging features. The solution would meet current needs for a unified e-mail and voice-mail inbox, as well as lay the foundation for future expansion of the district’s messaging capabilities with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007.

Our superintendent travels to a different school each day. Exchange Server 2007 connects him with what’s going on throughout the district at all times, wherever he is.  Keith Price Chief Technology Officer Hoover City Schools

Hoover City Schools saw that the Microsoft solution had the messaging features it was looking for and could be implemented at no additional cost under the district’s existing Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL). The district decided to work with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner TekLinks to implement unified messaging in its environment. TekLinks was ideally suited to the project; the firm had previously migrated the Hoover City Schools infrastructure from Novell GroupWise to the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, Exchange Server, and several Microsoft System Center applications. The TekLinks consultants immediately began to migrate Hoover City Schools’ Exchange Server 2003 environment to Exchange Server 2007.

“One of the great things about this deployment is that it’s a perfect example of how the process is supposed to work,” says Ann Merrihew, Education Inside Sales Representative at Microsoft. “We had a highly involved account manager, a partner that’s committed to our customers, a customer that knows and trusts the partner, and a Microsoft technology specialist at their disposal to help design the right solution for the customer’s needs.”

Chris Hoscheid, Senior Systems Engineer at TekLinks, says that the Hoover City Schools project exemplifies the solution provider’s approach. “Rather than suggest that our customers buy more products, we prefer whenever possible to empower them using the capabilities that they already have but might not be aware of,” he says. “With the Hoover City Schools project, we had already implemented Active Directory®, Exchange Server 2007, and centralized application and desktop management using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. All of the pieces were in place to create a unified messaging solution that met the district’s communication and collaboration goals.”

Hal White, Cisco Solutions Architect at TekLinks, led the unified messaging project. “Thanks to the interoperability of the Microsoft and Cisco technologies, Hoover City Schools was able to unify their voice and data messaging infrastructure seamlessly. Overall, they were able to provide a single point of management and user access for their voice and data needs.”

The project team began work in August 2007. By the time the school year began in September, unified voice mail and e-mail capabilities were being supplied by Exchange Server 2007, installed on Dell PowerEdge 2950 server computers. Exchange Server 2007 stores voice-mail and e-mail messages in the same mailbox, so the school district does not need separate systems for those tasks.

Using the solution, faculty and staff can look up internal contacts and check for messages through the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client on the desktop, on the Web using Office Outlook Web Access, and by telephone using natural language voice recognition in Office Outlook Voice Access. The Outlook Voice Access ability to convert text to speech means that users can call in over a regular touch-tone phone to have e-mail, calendar, personal contacts, and other information read to them.

The project team has begun to integrate Office Communications Server 2007 into the solution. The ability to easily move between e mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and video within the same environment has made it easier for faculty in different schools to communicate and share resources. Using the video component of Office Communicator 2007, students across the district will be able to work together on  projects.

With Exchange Server 2007, all of our teachers have voice-mail boxes that they can easily access from any phone or through e-mail. Parents can get directly in touch with any teacher in the district.  Keith Price Chief Technology Officer Hoover City Schools

Benefits

By using the unified messaging features of Exchange Server 2007 to make e-mail and voice mail available through many points of access, Hoover City Schools has given its employees more streamlined and flexible communication options. The new solution has already helped the district save U.S.$150,000 in maintenance costs. In addition, the district has increased staff productivity and made IT administration more efficient.

Significant Cost Savings

Migrating to Exchange Server 2007 has already resulted in a huge cost savings for the district. “The return on investment for Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging was instantaneous,” says Price. “We saved $150,000 this year in maintenance costs. Unified messaging is covered under our existing Exchange Server 2007 ECAL agreement, so it won’t require any additional licensing costs.”

More Efficient Communication

District employees can now receive both e mail and voice-mail messages in their inboxes, saving time and enhancing productivity. And because access to the unified inbox is also available from Windows Mobile® phones, people whose jobs take them far from a desk phone are able to stay in contact with colleagues to a much greater degree than was possible before.

“For administrative staff, the mobility that Exchange Server 2007 brings is a huge plus,” says Price. “Our superintendent travels to a different school each day. Exchange Server 2007 connects him with what’s going on throughout the district at all times, wherever he is at the moment.”

The unified messaging solution also makes it possible for more employees to access voice mail. “Previously, you only had voice mail if you had an actual phone,” says Price. “With Exchange Server 2007, all of our teachers have voice-mail boxes that they can easily access from any phone or through e-mail. Parents can get directly in touch with any teacher in the district. We’ve found that when parents and teachers can communicate like that, the students benefit tremendously.”

Improved IT Productivity

The IT department at Hoover City Schools reports that the new solution is easy to deploy and maintain, and has resulted in greater productivity for its staff.

By streamlining its messaging systems, the district has been able to free up its IT resources to focus on other projects. “By bringing all of our messaging into the Microsoft environment, we eliminated a lot of time-consuming and expensive cross-training in multiple systems,” says Price. “Everything is in one place, and it all works together by default.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about TekLinks products and services, call (205) 314-6600 or visit the Web site at:
www.teklinks.com

For more information about Hoover City Schools services, call (205) 439-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.hoover.k12.al.us

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2008