UMBC is one of three universities piloting the a new higher-education focused service to provide VoIP services to the campus. The press release on this is at the url: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/2/prweb10443365.htm.
The service is a hosted phone switch, called a PBX. UMBC is hoping to use this service to introduce new advanced phone services to the campus that our current older phone switch cannot handle.
DoIT will be the first pilot department to test the service; hopefully in late spring. Once we have validated it is working we will look at using this service to support some specific use cases for the campus:
- High volume support numbers where students may now get a busy signal and would benefit from queueing;
- Information messaging for specific number such as campus information or admission; and
- Departments needing extensive long-distance service.
This will be a multi-year effort as we evaluate the service offering and identify groups that would benefit from a move to the new service.
