Tarrant County College District Improves Learning Experience with Nortel and Microsoft Unified Communications

Innovative Communications Alliance Solution Enables TCCD to Focus on Education

DALLAS - To better serve its professors, faculty and students, the Tarrant County College District has deployed a unified communications solution from the Nortel* [TSX: NT | OTC: NRTLQ] and Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance . By integrating communications with their existing learning and teaching environments, Tarrant County College District ** has improved efficiencies by enhancing collaboration which has enabled the District to operate faster while lowering their operational expenses.

“The Innovative Communications Alliance solution enables real-time collaboration from a familiar Microsoft environment that incorporates Nortel features and reliability, which reduces and simplifies the time it takes to communicate. The goal is to provide new technologies that aid communications and expand the classroom learning environment,” said Dwayne Killins, project technical lead, TCCD.

“Our students and faculty will be able to reap the benefits of this technology,” said Dr. Mark Workman, vice president of Teaching and Learning, South East Campus, TCCD. “Faculty will be able to virtually bring guest speakers directly into their physical and/or virtual classrooms through the Live Meeting tools. Additionally, our college administrators should immediately realize tangible benefits, such as improved quality of work, with the implementation of this new toolset. The integrated communications solution will not only allow us to improve our traditional communications, but it will redefine the way that we do things in the future with students, faculty and staff.”

Joel Hackney, president, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel, said, “Speed, simplicity and savings drive a significant advantage for our Innovative Communications Alliance unified communications customers. Tarrant County College District is realizing the benefits of anywhere-anytime communications and the result is a more responsive, faster, better operational model. Especially in the field of education, the ability to share ideas is of particular importance - this solution provides the means to do so more effectively.”

In addition to improved operations, the Innovative Communications Alliance solution helps them identify and reduce their IT costs while enabling them to deliver new, high-value services with substantially less effort and over-head than previously possible.

“We already had both Microsoft and Nortel’s technology, so it was a simple software upgrade and integration from Nortel Services which made the evolution seamless and efficient. We expect a return on investment through the improved efficiencies this solution provides in the areas of desktop conferencing, for example, which reduces travel time to meetings for district employees,” said Ann Fuller, project manager for the TCCD initiative. “In addition to the work we completed with Nortel, Martin Patrick and Rick Barksdale, two of our key network experts, were instrumental in the deployment of this solution.”

Tarrant County College District unified communications solution provides converged office capabilities using Nortel’s Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 ** products.

Established between Nortel and Microsoft in 2006, the Innovative Communications Alliance has delivered unified communications to more than 1,200 customers around the world - with more than 200 Nortel service deployments globally.

The ICA offers a broad portfolio breadth that delivers unified communications solutions across a number of areas:

* Voice, Telephony and Unified Messaging
* Unified Communications Integrated Branch
* Conferencing
* Unified Communications Services
* Customer Care Solutions

More than 10,000 education customers worldwide have installed communications solutions from Nortel.