On Friday, September 4, Information Technology Services will transfer over the last big batch of phone lines to the Voice-over-Internet Protocol system in this major, multi-year project.
Some 662 phone lines will be converted in this 16th port of the project, said Cheri Beasley, Customer Services Manager with ITS Communication Technologies. This is on the heels of the July 24 port in which ITS changed 961 phone lines to VoIP from the legacy AT&T Centrex phone system.
With this 16th port, around 18,000 phone lines will have moved over to VoIP.
“But that doesn’t mean we’re done,” Beasley said. “There’s a lot of work yet to be done.”
Cleanup is what’s ahead as ITS approaches the beginning of the fourth year of the VoIP project. Going forward, ITS will port on a much smaller scale to pick up lines that didn’t get ported during the initial phase of the project. In addition, legacy hardware that remained in place during the conversion will be replaced, as well as complex applications such as Automatic Call Distribution/ACD and Uniform Call Distribution/UCD. Examples of some key phone lines that still must be switched over are the main numbers for the ITS Help Desk, Benefits, the Athletics Ticket Office, Memorial Hall Box Office, and patient care areas such as Campus Health Services, to name a few.
The conversion is expected to be finished next year.