Teachers College, Columbia University is the first and largest graduate school of education in the United States. We have over 5,000 students from nearly every state and nearly 80 different countries, and about 170 faculty. Teachers College has always been a school that has been experimental and on the cutting edge, including focusing on the use of technology to deliver great education and increase student engagement.
Until recently, we relied on, and were bound to, a traditional PBX system to enable communication throughout the Teachers College constituency. As our faculty, students, and staff have become increasingly mobile and have embraced multiple channels to communicate and collaborate, we decided we needed to move to a communications platform and system that would enable us to be more agile and flexible.
We found our solution in RingCentral.
One reason for choosing RingCentral is that it’s completely cloud-based, which aligns perfectly with our goal here at Teachers College to move to the cloud as our technology platform. By migrating from our legacy PBX system to RingCentral, we’ve eliminated the need to maintain and manage on-site equipment. RingCentral provides, maintains, and regularly updates its communications infrastructure and applications. We know we’re always on the latest version. We also gain business continuity and disaster recovery through the RingCentral platform, as it provides the geographic redundancy.
In fact, by moving to RingCentral, we’ve actually eliminated our entire telecom team. RingCentral is simple enough to use and manage that we don’t need experts to add new numbers or provision new users.
There have been additional advantages to moving to RingCentral.
We can support our users across all the devices they choose for communication and collaboration, including their smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, and even desktop phones (although for most of us, our desktop phones are really just ornaments since we’re on the move so often). With RingCentral, users can also access voicemail from any location on any device.
As a cloud-based software solution, RingCentral provides us with global communications reach and capabilities, simply and at local costs. It also meets our security requirements, and integrates seamlessly with Google Apps, which we use here.
By migrating to RingCentral, Teachers College provided faculty and staff, access to the most advanced, reliable and feature-rich enterprise communications solution to increase their efficiency and productivity.
The RingCentral team recently visited Teachers College to see how we’re communicating firsthand. Watch this video to see what they discovered.
Originally published Sep 08, 2016, updated Oct 26, 2021