Training centers cures collaboration headache

With 16 field offices spread across the Middle East and North Africa -- in addition to a branch in Washington -- American Mideast Educational Training Services (AMIDEAST), a nonprofit educational testing and English-language training organization, constantly struggled with high phone bills and inadequate communications. Its globally dispersed directors, business developers, and student advisory groups needed to collaborate on several projects, but the clash of time zones, work days, and frequent staff travel, in combination with the high costs of international calling and voice and videoconferencing, made any collaboration difficult and expensive.

Ugur Usumi, AMIDEAST's IT director, tackled the problem head-on by installing a Siemens HiPath 4000 PBX in the Washington office and connecting its international offices over an IP VPN via IP phones, which sat on the desks of a far-flung staff aside their existing phones. This made most international calls virtually free. "Communications improved immediately because people no longer hesitated to make international calls," Usumi says.

It was the addition of Siemens' OpenScape real-time communications software, however, that really threw the doors open. OpenScape layers phone presence, find-me/follow-me functionality and voice, Web, and videoconferencing on top of Microsoft Live Communications Server and adds its own user portal client. Each OpenScape user can designate a preferred device to which all calls to his or her desk phone will be redirected at any time, while maintaining complete control over when, where, and by whom he or she can be contacted. All voice mail goes to AMIDEAST's HiPath Xpressions unified messaging system based on Exchange.

Presence capabilities make it clear who is available by phone or IM, and the combination of these features with built-in voice, Web, and videoconferencing makes it simple to fire up an ad hoc collaboration session for far less money and effort than when AMIDEAST was using outside conferencing services.

"I can simply drag and drop names to start a conference call with a group of four, five, or six people in Cairo, Beirut, and Kuwait," Usumi says. "The PBX then calls all the group members on their preferred devices and calls me back when they're all connected. If users are willing to take calls from certain people during late hours, they can tell OpenScape, and it will find them."

Group members can also collaborate on documents and presentations in real time. If a user forgets to change find-me/follow-me information, he can call the OpenScape server and use its voice-recognition capabilities to make the change. Users at a hotel or airport with a Wi-Fi connection can log in to OpenScape with their laptops and softphones and handle international calls via the PBX at the office.

Usumi found the installation of the gateway, OpenScape, and IP phones so easy that he added IP phones ahead of schedule. "The bigger challenge was training the staff that was less comfortable with computers to actually use these features," Usumi says.