Rosedale Union School District Selects Shoreline VoIP Solution

Business Wire, March 24, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 24, 2003

Deployed at Two Sites Thus Far, Shoreline IP PBXs Will Ultimately

Link Eight Schools Plus District Offices in Single, Seamless System

The Rosedale Union School District of Bakersfield, Calif., has begun deployment of voice-over-IP technology from Shoreline Communications to create a single, seamless telephone system between its schools and offices. The Shoreline IP PBX has been installed in the district's newest elementary school and its bus transportation facility, with several additional sites to be deployed in the next few months. The Shoreline equipment is replacing Dukane Communication Systems' STARCall phone systems, which are designed specifically for school use.

"When I joined the district, we had six sites with six distinct Dukane phone systems, but the industry was moving toward VoIP," said Robert Chambers, director of the district's Department of Technology Services. "Dukane was the 'safe' choice for schools, so I had to be sure VoIP would provide all the usual functions and more. Since a new school and bus facility were being built, we had an opportunity to set a standard that would stay with the district for a long time."

Chambers spent about a year evaluating VoIP systems from Cisco Systems, 3Com and Shoreline. A major requirement was the ability to integrate the schools' Rauland intercom/bell system with the telephones. "We need to be able to pick up a phone on any campus and dial up an extension to a classroom speaker, to contact a teacher or broadcast an announcement," Chambers said. "Shoreline was the only vendor that could do that."

In addition, the district had standardized on Extreme switches, and wanted a telephone system that could run on its existing network infrastructure. "Cisco VoIP would only run on Cisco gear, so we would have had to buy separate switches to run the phones -- and every phone would have had to be a Cisco IP phone," Chambers recalled. "These factors would have boosted the per-site cost as high as our legacy system. Shoreline, which comes in at a third of that cost, runs on the Extreme switches and lets us use inexpensive standard analog phones -- which is great in the student locations where we know the phones take a beating."

Shoreline's web-based interface lets Chambers manage the system from his Windows desktop even though his own office is not at a site that has yet deployed Shoreline. "The system is so intuitive that I never even had to go through the Shoreline training. Without leaving my desk I can move the primary call-receiver location in our transportation facility from the secretary's desk to the maintenance director's. Previously, we had to contract any moves or changes out to service providers, and we were at their mercy in terms of cost and timing. Even our least technically advanced office staffers have learned the Shoreline system easily, and now they absolutely love being able to use their PCs to transfer calls or set up conferences."

About the Rosedale Union School District

The Rosedale Union School District, more than a century old, provides kindergarten through eighth-grade education to an area encompassing 28 square miles in the southern San Joaquin Valley of Central California, in and near the city of Bakersfield. The district includes six elementary and two middle schools. Four of the district's schools are California Distinguished School recipients, and two have received the U.S. Department of Education's National Blue Ribbon Designation.

About Shoreline Communications

Shoreline Communications, Inc., has been shipping IP PBX systems since October 1998. The company's award-winning IP telephone solution is based on a distributed call-control architecture that creates a seamless single telephone system across multiple locations within an enterprise, delivering high system availability and eliminating the "single point of failure" problem common to other products. An intuitive PC-based user interface gives management an unprecedented level of control, and end users unmatched ease of use, compared to traditional PBXs. The Shoreline system also provides a rich set of integrated voice services and standards-based interfaces to third-party voice applications that enhance personal and organizational productivity. For more information, visit http://www.goshoreline.com or call 1-877-80SHORE.