4 Steps to Unified Communications

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4 Steps to Unified Communications

Villanova University's Stephen Fugale talks VoIP migration

11/1/2007

By Dian Schaffhauser

If you could design a massive technology project from the earliest stages all the way through deployment and complete and total user adoption, what would the plan look like? Probably it would involve expert advisors, cooperation among all the participants, top-notch products, sufficient time, knowledgeable feet on the ground, extensive training, broad executive support and a budget that wouldn't hamstring decision-making. Perhaps it would resemble the Villanova University rollout of unified communications.

CIO Stephen Fugale is no stranger to large and ambitious IT initiatives. After all, the university where he has worked for six years, based in suburban Philadelphia, with 10,000 students and 2,500 faculty and staff members, was named the top wired college in America last December in a joint research project of The Princeton Review and PC Magazine. In this regard, Villanova beat out MIT. It beat out Stanford. It beat out 358 other schools that make up the Review's survey of the best colleges in the country.

What makes it so amazing? Fugale said simply, "We look to add convenience, service, functionality." That translates to more than simply making sure every freshman is handed a notebook computer (refreshed at the end of the sophomore year) or going wireless across the 254-acre campus (a project slightly more than halfway done, according to Fugale). The school provides a state of the art working lab in its business school that "replicates the world of being on the trading floor," said Fugale. Nursing students have been issued PDAs to get mobile access to clinic applications. The graduate nursing program has experimented with providing students with webcam access so they can interact with professors. The engineering college has tried out tablet PCs for distance learning. Students can use a browser-based laundry application to check the availability of dorm washers and reserve them, then text message laggards whose clothes have been left in the dryers. Student ID cards not only grant access to buildings, they can be used to make purchases from online campus vending machines, as well as 40 merchants off campus.

At Villanova, said Fugale, "We like to view the technology offer we have as broad.... You experience it in multiple ways."

Yet one area where the campus seemingly lagged was in its telephone network. "We have known our old system--a typical PBX system--had passed its end of life," said Fugale. Villanova was waiting for voice over IP (VoIP) to "harden." Once it had made the determination that the products and services were mature, however, and budget was in place, Villanova sprang into action last year.