How Yeastar is pioneering unified communications in schools

students raising their hands in a classroom - TeleDynamics blog

Unified communications (UC) solutions have become indispensable for modern organizations, including K-12 schools. Yeastar's UC solutions provide services and essential flexibility to address primary and secondary educational institutions' unique challenges and specific needs.

This article delves into the need for unified communications in schools and the diverse advantages that Yeastar's systems bring to the education sector.

The importance and challenges of having unified communications in schools

K-12 schools must respond to the needs of a unique combination of individuals.

First and foremost, we have students who require a secure learning environment ready to respond to any emergency. Schools need public announcements, paging, and intercom systems to ensure ease of communication throughout the facility.

Second, schools must provide the teaching staff with the right tools to maximize their teaching capabilities. Schools must also maintain direct and multi-channel communications among teachers and other staff, whether on or off campus. High-quality collaboration tools must be at their disposal to take full advantage of the effectiveness of remote communications and interactions.

Third, all schools must empower their administrators with flexible telephony applications to aid them in their work. Highly configurable call routing facilities, recorded greetings and messages, and integration with other systems on the school's network are all necessary to streamline operations.

Finally, schools need to empower the IT support staff involved in the maintenance and administration of these systems with management tools to enable remote administration, automatic provisioning and simple integration with existing systems.

How Yeastar responds to these challenges

Yeastar offers an integrated, holistic solution to K-12 schools that delivers all the required features and capabilities of these educational institutions. School communications and safety are substantially improved by easily integrating UC systems with phones, intercoms, paging systems and facility security systems.

This way, the school campus is protected through controlled access, ensuring that security staff and administrators are constantly aware of visitor movements.

Emergency services such as 911, mass alert notifications and facility-wide announcements are all used to increase the safety and security of the students and staff.

Teachers can enjoy using an advanced communications application, allowing them to access an internal extension number on a mobile device and be reachable on or off campus. This same app provides collaboration tools, video conferencing and file sharing at their fingertips, creating a rich interactive experience with their colleagues.

Administrators will have a highly customizable telephony system with advanced call routing, recorded announcements, personalized greetings and call queues. These features will help them manage communications with all interested parties in the best possible way, including parents, teachers and other relevant parties.

IT staff will love Yeastar's high compatibility with equipment from other vendors and its simple point-and-click remote configuration and management capability. This substantially reduces the IT support team's necessary size (and thus cost).

Yeastar's systems have already been successfully deployed in school environments, helping to modernize telephony, PA systems, and collaboration platforms, showing that its solutions have a real-world track record.

Features of Yeastar's UC system

Beyond the advantages to particular groups of people within the K-12 educational environment, Yeastar's UC system delivers features that are invaluable to similar organizations:

Unified communications: UC itself is an enhanced communications and collaboration platform that enriches the interaction of remote participants, resulting in more meaningful and effective partnerships.
Integrated PA system: Yeastar's solution can be integrated with an existing analog PA system or paired with SIP-based speakers that schools and businesses can deploy wherever there is a network connection.
High compatibility: Yeastar's solutions are highly compatible with virtually all SIP-based IP phones and devices. You can also integrate existing analog phones to lower costs and ease the transition process from traditional telephony to VoIP.

Yeastar's innovative UC components

Yeastar's UC solution is composed of the following innovative components:

At the center of the UC environment, we have Yeastar's P-Series PBXs. These devices act as the hub or intelligence center of the whole system. All VoIP devices and apps register to this platform and can leverage communications features and capabilities.
Yeastar's wide variety of voice gateways delivers the capabilities of analog devices such as traditional phones, conventional PA systems, and intercoms. They also interconnect the telephony system to the PSTN (using ISDN or PSTN circuits) or to the cellular network. Voice gateways can also be useful in creating an interconnection with conventional PBXs in environments where a phased approach to migration is preferred.
Yeastar's Linkus app for desktop, laptop, and mobile devices is the ideal choice to enjoy the full potential of communications capabilities right from your mobile device or PC.

Beyond the devices and apps themselves, Yeastar's systems are certified for integration with Microsoft Teams, further elevating the system's usefulness in educational environments. Microsoft Teams is a widely used platform among schools, and the addition of Yeastar's UC system adds more value to existing applications and services.

Financial considerations

Technology has revolutionized K-12 education, enhancing family and community involvement and improving emergency management systems. However, the challenge of affordability remains because not all schools can readily finance upgrading or replacing their more traditional systems.

Balancing the merits of telecom investment against a constrained IT budget is a significant concern. Thankfully, Yeastar UC solutions offer cost-effective technology options for K-12 schools regardless of size. This accessibility ensures that more educational institutions can benefit from these technological advancements.

Conclusion

Yeastar's UC systems and related equipment and applications represent a practical, transformative solution for modernizing telephony, PA, and collaboration systems in educational settings. Their successful deployment in schools is a tribute to the tangible benefits and real-world applicability of these advanced technological solutions.