With the recent impact of COVID-19, the phone deployment schedule had to be adjusted temporarily. However, phone deployments on campus have resumed. Prior to phones being deployed, users will receive a communication indicating the date that their phone will be deployed. They are also alerted that a five–minute outage of service could impact those users who are utilizing Remote Desktop services. Users will have the option to request that their phones be deployed before 8 a.m. in order to avoid service disruption. To date, over 47% of physical phones on campus have been deployed.
After the unexpected transition for employees to work from home, we have focused our efforts to perform partial migrations. A partial migration allows us to convert an employee to our Enterprise Voice service so that employees who are currently working from home can utilize Skype for Business to make or receive calls through their desktop or mobile app instead of relying on personal phone numbers or call forwarding through their old PBX phone. Currently, we have migrated 68% of employees eligible for voice service. In addition to the phone and enterprise voice migrations, we have been deploying new Polycom conference room phones. 80% of conference phones have been deployed. These new models provide the same conference capability as the original conference phones plus additional Skype for Business features to make starting and joining meetings easier.
For more information on the phone project, visit the Phone Replacement Project page. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by contacting help@smu.edu.
