As you are probably well aware, the last few weeks on campus have been active as we shifted our focus to telecommuting support, which is critical to University operations at this time. In the span of two weeks, we were able to transition a total of 27 individuals from Enrollment Services, Facilities, IT Help Desk, and SMU Operators to our new call center. Without a quick implementation, these areas would not have been able to work remotely.
Our other critical step in our phone project, the replacement of older PBX phones to the newer AudioCodes VoIP phones, had to be put on hold. Since the University has moved to only essential personnel on campus, we have paused deployments of new phones through April 3, 2020.
Currently, Non-Enterprise Voice users, those with the older PBX phones, have limited feature functionality in Skype for Business while telecommuting. While those users wait to be migrated to new phones and added to the Enterprise Voice system, we recommend the Zoom platform for meetings with guests and students. We know that this solution might not be ideal for all users, and our team continues to investigate alternative methods for migrating users to Enterprise Voice while most staff and faculty are working from home.
This week, OIT is working with users in Blanton to pilot migrations to Enterprise Voice while users are off-campus. While we are optimistic about this pilot, the deployment of physical phones may be delayed until after the return of employees to campus.
We want to be flexible in these challenging times and are still working on completing this project in a timely manner. OIT continues to refine our deployment for this project to meet these new challenges. Our migration schedule might need to be revised, but we will be communicating to campus within the next four weeks. For the latest information, please see the Phone Replacement Project page at smu.edu/OIT/Governance/CurrentProjects/PhoneReplacementProject.
