Community starts with good communication. Education has undergone a number of important changes in the last few decades. Working parents have less and less time to spend on school-related activities. Curricula have expanded, placing greater expectations on schools of all levels to fulfill the education needs of today’s job market. A continuous decrease in public funding has forced many schools to streamline operations. With cutbacks to administrative staff and community after-school programs, student safety, security and privacy are increasing concerns. Education is about working with the community and good communication is an intrinsic part of community building. Students may spend several hours a day away from home in school, as well as before-school and after-school programs, making safety and security a paramount concern. At the post-secondary level, colleges and universities are looking to technology to make education more affordable and more accessible. Whether it’s phone-based registration or a simple homework hotline, parents and students are increasingly expecting schools to provide them with self-service information. As a result, today’s schools are investing in a number of different programs and technologies in order to build a strong community.

Schools face a number of communications challenges.

Multiple, aging phone systems. A school board responsible for a number of different schools or a university with multiple campuses may have several different phone systems from several different vendors. Each will have separate maintenance costs, and often, require specialized skills to maintain. As phone systems age, it becomes more difficult and expensive to replace equipment. Keeping older phone systems running and working together can quickly overburden facilities staff.

Communication costs are going up. Upgrading a traditional system to meet the needs of today’s schools is very expensive. They also require a great deal of maintenance for very busy facilities staff. Interactive Voice Response systems that would enable parents and teachers to service some of their information needs are costly and difficult to develop. Multiple technologies and systems mean high costs to ensure that the systems work together effectively. And the more complicated a system is, the higher the cost to train staff.

Separate voice, fax and e-mail systems make it hard to organize information. Whether it’s a voice mail with allergy information, an e-mail reporting a student’s absence or a faxed in permission slip, student information is getting harder and harder to manage. Traditional phone systems require that staff manage voice mail, e-mail and faxes in very different ways. This separation makes it more difficult and more time consuming to keep track of information for a particular student, class or teacher.

Student safety. With the growing diversity of ways to communicate, student privacy, confidentiality and security are becoming harder to maintain. E-mails and voice mails are forwarded. Faxes are lost, misdirected, or intercepted. Separate systems for phone, fax and e-mail messages provide multiple points for security breaches.

Objectworld UC Server can help schools meet these challenges.

A school is more than bricks and mortar, and an effective phone system is more than just dial tone. A phone system should make it easy for staff to integrate and manage multiple schools or locations from the same centralized system. It should make it easy for everyone to communicate, taking the burden off of students to be information carriers. And it should allow schools to provide information to parents, students and staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, whether it’s a homework hotline, events calendar or school closure notices. With Objectworld, powerful but simple collaboration tools make it easy to build your school’s community with strong communications.

Lower costs. With Objectworld, schools can eliminate redundant paging services and fax machines while improving the flow of communications between teachers, students, staff and parents. Schools can further maximize the investment they’ve already made in their phone systems by deploying Objectworld UC Server Standard Edition with their existing PBX or cut long distances charges with Objectworld UC Server SIP Edition. Both products allow schools to keep costs to a minimum while making communications easier.

Improved privacy and security. With Objectworld products, schools can easily improve student security and confidentiality by directing faxes, voice mails and e-mails to secure staff e-mail inboxes. School staff use simple Windows-based software interfaces to manage all messages about a student in one place — their e-mail inboxes — lessening the chances of student information getting into the wrong hands.

Simple management means greater productivity. With Objectworld products, very complicated changes with a traditional phone system are just a couple of mouse clicks. Employees can manage their own communications or IT staff can set system-wide policies. Both products are entirely Windows-based, making for simple, intuitive interfaces with which most educational staff are already familiar. Administrators use simple, Windows-based productivity tools to make changes, whether it’s adding an extension, configuring voice mail or setting up an absentee hotline. available from any Windows desktop. Staff access voice mails, e-mails and faxes directly in Microsoft® Outlook® or Lotus® Notes®. They can prioritize and group those messages according to client or levels of urgency.

Effective communication 24/7. Schools can improve privacy and their engagement with parents by providing self-service information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with Objectworld’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capabilities. IVR makes it easy for everyone to stay on top of critical information, whether it’s a school closure due to weather, the day’s homework, or reporting a child’s absence. Objectworld products make IVR simple and inexpensive for schools, with a point-and-click service creation environment that requires no programming. Objectworld Authorized Resellers are also available to build custom IVR applications.

Extend your existing phone system with Objectworld UC Server Standard Edition or transition to VoIP with Objectworld UC Server SIP Edition. Objectworld UC Server provides unified messaging, unified communications, notification, voice conferencing, fax capabilities and more. Whether you want to extend your investment in your existing PBX or lower costs by moving to VoIP, Objectworld UC Server can help your business meet its challenges. With Objectworld UC Server, schools can easily integrate an entire school division within a single, flexible and simple phone system. Objectworld UC Server provides the productivity and administration tools that businesses need to manage the system directly from anywhere in the system.

Protect your investment. Every day, computers are becoming faster and cheaper, and people around the globe are imagining new ways to communicate. Objectworld’s open, software-based approach means that as computers become faster and less expensive, your school will benefit directly in cost-savings. With Objectworld’s certified and supported Connect Partners, schools can buy and upgrade third-party hardware and applications, like phones, media gateways, and video conferencing hardware and software, as they need to. Objectworld products provide flexible, secure and cost-effective integration with other phone systems.