Grandstream Networks and Objectworld Communications have partnered to deliver an end-to-end unified communications (UC) solution for Pembina Trails School Division. The solution broadens Pembina Trails School Division’s ability to build a stronger learning community with its 14,000 students and parents by making communications between parents, teachers, students, and staff easier and more responsive.

The school division’s IT team serves more than 2,000 staff members across 34 buildings all connected via Canada’s fastest educational dark fiber network. The partnership provides the staff members of Pembina Trails with more than 500 of Grandstream’s GXP280 IP phones in combination with Objectworld Unified Communication Server, an end-to-end UC solution. The combination provides everything from Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), unified messaging, call control, virtual voicemail, voice paging, emergency out-dialing, and other features with Grandstream’s high-quality, feature-rich and low-cost phones.

"This partnership helps us put hundreds of quality phones together with unified communications capabilities across our schools for remarkably low cost. Objectworld’s solution already saves us up to $200,000 a year with unified communications. By adding Grandstream’s phones to the solution, it will help us save more while making it easier for our teachers and staff to stay in touch with parents," said Don Reece, director of information technology at Pembina Trails School Division.

Together, Objectworld and Grandstream provide the school division with a lower total cost of ownership, robust functionality, and a plug-and-play solution. Grandstream’s products take minutes to install and provision and Objectworld UC Server delivers important features to educational institutions such as:

• Emergency out dialing, notification and paging. Emergency alerts can be broadcast through the school’s overhead paging systems, and over the Grandstream phones for teachers, staff, students, and parents to be notified immediately of emergencies with automated out dialing.
• Virtual voice mail. Temporary or mobile staff without office phones can still have voicemail and check messages from anywhere, allowing them to respond more quickly to parents.
• Auto-configure and auto-detection of Grandstream’s phones. Staff plug the phone into an Ethernet connection and UC Server configures Grandstream’s feature-rich phones as required, saving IT staff potentially hundreds of hours of deployment time.
• Unified e-mail, voicemail and fax. Objectworld’s unified messaging feature integrated with fax allows anyone to fax from their desktop and receive their fax messages in an e-mail, ensuring staff have all parent communications at their fingertips. This feature allows the school division to save hundreds every month by eliminating redundant fax lines.

"We are very excited to partner with Objectworld and Pembina Trails School Division to deliver 500 phones to their teachers and staff. At Grandstream, our mission is to provide customers with the best products at an unrivaled price-performance point on the market," said David Li, CEO of Grandstream. "The GXP 280 provides high-fidelity wideband audio and a full-duplex speakerphone with rich functionality, ideal for customers who want a high-quality, flexible phone for low-cost."

"Schools rely on effective communication, whether it’s reporting a child absent to the school or alerting parents with automatic emergency notification," said David Levy, Objectworld’s president and CEO. "At Objectworld, we’re very proud to be working with Grandstream and playing an important role in helping Pembina Trails School Division build their learning community with effective, low-cost unified communications."

Pembina Trails School division initially partnered with Objectworld to bring UC to the school division in 2006. Reece added, "At the time, the vendors we were talking to were saying, ‘you need a Cisco solution’. We needed Objectworld. This new partnership with Grandstream, which would have been impossible had we bought Cisco, or another proprietary solution is another reminder that Objectworld was the right choice."