Let there be Voice

And the President said, Let there be Voice: and there was Voice.


Indeed. The much needed Enterprise Voice... for many reasons. Extraordinary savings, complete integration with our existing services, new, unseen before features and… the age’s old question – “Can I do it.” Don’t get me wrong, the latter is strictly personal. As a Professional, I will never jeopardize my Institution’s operations just to see what I am made of.

Implementing VoIP is not an easy task. There are many factors to be considered – from pure technical details to, yes, the “psychology of change”. Do you remember when I said “Beware what you wish” in my first post? Although I have been testing OCS EV for almost 18 months and had 100% confidence in my ability to pull this in GMC, I underestimated the ability of our users to fight “change in the work place” with any means. Can’t blame them, though – when a three star General (our President) say “I want it and I want it now”, my military training kicks in, the “common sense” receives “Shut up and do it” command and… Let me explain:

First – why I talk singular. GMC have five major locations, two extensions office and five offices in military bases throughout the State of Georgia. Total of 1,300 computers, 500 FT users, 4,000 – 6,000 students – all this maintained with 9 (nine) IT folks. I am responsible for the entire network and all servers (all 60 of them). Because of this, I take my role in the Institution VERY seriously since there are no “shared” responsibilities and so, “I” is the expression of pride and curse in the same time.

Second, the deployment was completed in 45 days. Now, this might look a lot of time and yet, it was quite not enough in terms of working with the users to explain the upcoming changes and mainly, to setup the new service as close as possible in order to mimic their current work flow while greatly enhancing it. Even though the Management realized the benefits of the migration, some of our end-users (still) see it as “twisting hands”… Can’t make everybody happy…

What we did comes… tomorrow.