Technology

SchoolMessenger for Cisco Unified Communications

SchoolMessenger for Cisco Unified Communications is a full-featured notification solution that enables school districts to leverage their existing investment in Cisco IPT infrastructure and lower costs by using existing trunk capacity to deliver telephone broadcasts over the public telephone network. SchoolMessenger for Cisco Unified Communications is the only Cisco-certified outbound notification solution designed exclusively for schools. This solution includes almost all of the same functionality as SchoolMessenger CommSuite, our fully hosted service, albeit in a premise-based solution.

Seamless CallManager Integration

Districts need not dedicate phone circuits to the sole purpose of supporting standalone autodialers. Customers only need to add and configure CTI ports using CallManager Administration software, and assign those ports to their SchoolMessenger system. The number of ports equals the number of simultaneous calls that can be made during a broadcast notification.

Turnkey Scalability

Configurable to match the capacity and redundancy requirements of any school district, SchoolMessenger for Cisco Unified Communications is a turnkey application that can be implemented with as few as one port on a single server or scaled to hundreds of ports. The system is available as a SmartCall or in a standalone licensed model.

We wanted a solution that would integrate with our Cisco IP phone systems so that we could get a better return on our investment with Cisco phones and the phone lines that we had available with that system, by also incorporating the parent notification solution. To my knowledge, SchoolMessenger is still the only parent notification system that is certified by Cisco to integrate with their phone solution.

We looked at hosted versus utilizing it in-house. When we did the cost comparison, we had a return on investment in less than one year."

-Bob Daughrity
Director of Technology Services
Pasadena ISD, TX