CONESTOGA COLLEGE STRENGTHENS ITS EMERGENCY RESPONSE WITH ALLSTREAM'S UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

ORGANIZATION
Conestoga College is one of Canada's premier polytechnic institutes.

CHALLENGE
With an outdated communication infrastructure, Conestoga lacked sufficient emergency response and voicemail capabilities. telephony solution.

SOLUTION
Conestoga adopted a unified communications solution from Allstream featuring IP telephony, integrated paging and an upgraded voice network.

OUTCOMES

• Enhanced its emergency response system with the capacity to alert 250 staff, plus students across six campuses, to emergency situations
• Gained the ability to deliver targeted messages to 11 different paging zones
• Migrated to a new IP-based system at lower cost than upgrading its older technology

Charged with the safety of their staff and students, educational institutions are well aware of the importance of emergency preparedness. This is particularly true for Conestoga College, which serves almost 50,000 full- and part-time students at six campuses across Southwestern Ontario. Yet an outdated communication infrastructure was hampering the college's ability to reach its students and 250 staff members in real time. Worse, upgrading the existing hardware and software at its main campus was much more costly than the college had anticipated.

SOLUTION

To resolve this issue, Conestoga turned to its trusted advisors at Allstream. After reviewing the college's requirements, Allstream recommended the adoption of an IP telephony solution that featured paging capabilities and an enhanced voice network. Allstream helped Conestoga leverage its legacy investments by integrating its new paging technology into its existing overhead paging system, which consisted of 11 paging zones that reached across Conestoga's various campuses. In addition, it set up over 250 IP phone handsets in targeted classrooms. With a phased migration, Conestoga would also be able to migrate to an entirely new IP-based system, and purchase all its IP handsets and paging technology, for less than it would have cost to upgrade its legacy system.

Thanks to this set up, college administrators can target messages to any combination of overhead speaker paging zones and/or IP handsets without disturbing staff and students elsewhere on campus. To prepare for emergency situations such as school closures or evacuations, messages can be programmed and assigned to zones and handsets through an intuitive web interface. These pre-recorded messages can streamline emergency response and prevent miscommunication.

Finally, Conestoga further leveraged its IP telephony implementation to enhance its system-wide voice network, streamlining inter-campus dialing.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Since implementing this integrated unified communications solution, Conestoga has:

• Enhanced its emergency response system with the capacity to alert 250 staff, plus students across six campuses, to emergency situations
• Gained the ability to deliver targeted messages to 11 different paging zones
• Migrated to a new IP-based system at lower cost than upgrading its older technology
• Streamlined its intra-campus and inter-campus communications