Helping a local hospital move to a new building. With one week of notice!
By Eileen Zapien, Provisioning Manager for Avid Communications
I’ve been working for Avid since 2014, and I really enjoy working with our customers. Recently, I was able to help one of our oldest customers move their VoIP phone system to a new building here in Kansas City. During the project, we upgraded their phones with new firmware and converted them over to our provisioning server (more on that in a minute!)
Our customer had been planning to move to a new building for several years. (I’ve chosen not to mention their name due to HIPAA… ha!) We had received an order to deliver new phones and our technician came back with a surprise. They were getting ready to move into a new facility in just one week! We’re talking about dozens of phones, each with their own configuration. This is normally a project that we would plan for weeks in advance.
An important part of this move was reconfiguring their existing phones. They wanted to set up new paging groups and departments. They also needed to separate the clinic phones, hospital phones and patient phones into separate ring groups.
Team Based Approach
I worked with Taylor Cates, Director of Sales and Mark Lindsay, Account Executive for Avid Communications on this project. Mark went on site to help me identify what configuration each phone needed on the fly. This was a 3-4 stage project spaced out a few weeks at a time. Each session would start first thing in the morning and end around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. (There wasn’t much we could do to prepare proactively because there were too many variables.)
Provisioning Server
One of the benefits of moving their VoIP phones to Avid’s provisioning server is so that we can quickly make changes to their phone settings. This is something we weren’t able to do for them in the past. Previously, most end user changes required a Simple Help remote desktop session and manual intervention from someone on their end to reboot the phone after we made changes. Now they’re able to request changes and we can push those changes to their phones immediately (and those changes take effect once the phone is rebooted. Our clients can choose when that needs to happen.)
Once our project was complete, our customer was very happy with the outcome. It wasn’t a typical project, but I was happy to be part of it and we made it happen!
