Microsoft Office System
Customer Solution Case Study
What Hurricane Ike Destroyed, YES Prep
Restored with Unified Communications
Customer: YES Prep Public Schools
Website: www.yesprep.org
Customer Size: 360 employees
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Education
Partner: Hitachi Consulting
Customer Profile
YES Prep Public Schools of Houston,
Texas, is a highly successful public district
that serves 3,500 students across seven
campuses and sends all of its graduates
to four-year colleges and universities.
Software and Services
 Microsoft Office
− Microsoft Office 2010 Professional
Plus
− Microsoft Office Communications
Server 2007
− Microsoft Office Communications
Server 2007 R2
− Microsoft Office Communicator
2007
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
 Microsoft Enterprise Agreement
For more information about other
Microsoft customer successes, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies
“With Microsoft, it costs just $30,000 to get communications into a school, a savings of 92 percent over the
way we used to do it. That’s the whole cost.”
Richard Charlesworth, Chief Information Officer, YES Prep Public Schools
YES Prep Public Schools in Houston, Texas, was a great success
story in the education of inner-city youth—and then Hurricane
Ike leveled the district’s schools and offices in a day. To rebuild
the phone system, the district relied on Microsoft Unified
Communications. It was the fastest, cheapest way to restore
voice capabilities, and add presence and video conferencing.
Costs plunged 92 percent and curriculum quality is enhanced.
Business Needs
When Hurricane Ike swept across the Gulf
of Mexico and into Texas in September
2008, it left in its wake 117 dead and
U.S.$27 billion in damage. In this context,
the damage to the YES Prep Public Schools
in Houston might not seem like much—
but to the 3,500 students of the schools
and their parents, the damage was
significant enough. YES Prep had been
founded as a charter school in 1998, to
increase the number of low-income
students who graduate from four-year
colleges. Over 10 years, it had grown to a
seven-school district serving grades 6
through 12, with a decade-long record of
sending every one of its graduates to a
four-year college.
Now, in a day, the district’s buildings had
been destroyed. Administrators and faculty
were determined to rebuild—and to do so
quickly. For Richard Charlesworth, Chief
Information Officer at YES Prep, one of the
key challenges lay in rebuilding the
district’s telephone network. Charlesworth
estimated that outfitting the facilities with
Cisco hardware and software would take
$400,000 and several weeks that the
district didn’t have. The IT staff would have
to be trained in deploying and managing
the new system, and faculty and
administrators would have to be trained in
its use.
There had to be another, faster, cheaper
way.
Solution
Instead of enduring a weeks-long delay for
PBX and other telephone hardware to be
ordered, shipped, received, deployed, installed, and configured, YES Prep considered a
software-only approach that would run on
the district’s existing computer network and
could be downloaded immediately to the
district and pushed out to PCs.
Charlesworth and his colleagues quickly
tested two software-only solutions, one
each from Cisco and Microsoft. The winner:
Microsoft Office Communications Server
2007. “The Cisco UI [user interface] wasn’t
mature, and that had a big impact on our
decision,” says Charlesworth. “Office
Communications Server was familiar, based
on the same Windows software we’d been
using for 10 years. The teachers got it
immediately.”
YES Prep deployed Office Communications
Server in three weeks. In addition to
telephony, the district gained other
Microsoft Unified Communications services
including presence; instant messaging;
audio, video, and web conferencing; and a
unified message inbox, including voice mail.
Teachers and administrators access the
solution through Microsoft Office
Communicator 2007 software on their
desktop or portable PCs. The PCs have
built-in speakers and microphones, making
them fully equipped to handle softwarebased phone calls; the district also buys
headsets, at $7.39 per unit, to make the
solution even easier to use. It purchased a
few Polycom CX200 software-capable
handsets, at $139 per unit, to provide
phone service independent of PCs.
The district now is working with Hitachi
Consulting, a Microsoft Gold Certified
Partner, to upgrade its deployment to
Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
The two have just completed a project to
upgrade the district’s infrastructure with
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus
and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.
Benefits
By choosing Office Communications
Server, YES Prep restored communications
faster and less expensively than it could
have done otherwise, continues to save as
it opens new schools, and has revamped
core processes, such as curriculum
development.
Saves 92 Percent on Deployment
YES Prep wanted to avoid the cost inherent
in the deployment of a Cisco hardware
solution. With Office Communications
Server 2007, the district restored its phone
service at just 20 percent of the cost of
replacing three PBX systems. The district’s
savings are magnified by a Microsoft
Enterprise Agreement plan, whose Client
Access Licenses and Software Assurance
reduce the cost of software and eliminate
the cost of upgrades over the life of the
agreement. The district’s savings will
continue to grow, as YES Prep plans to
open one or two campuses—the
equivalent of two to four schools—every
year for the next few years. Because Office
Communications Server is covered by the
federal ERATE program, YES Prep receives
ERATE grants covering 90 percent of its
growing deployment.
“With Microsoft, it costs just $30,000 to get
communications into a school, a savings of
92 percent over the way we used to do it,”
says Charlesworth. “That’s the whole
cost—and 90 percent of that is covered by
ERATE. It’s unheard of—astonishing!”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published August 2010
Speeds Installation 200 to 300 Percent
The district also met its deadline with
Office Communications Server;
Charlesworth estimates it would have
taken two to three times as long with
Cisco. “We were able to rebuild the voice
network for the district before we even
rebuilt the buildings,” he says. “We were
able to deliver unified communications to
all of our teachers and staff even though
they were teaching in trailers, gymnasiums,
and hastily rented off-site warehouses—
Microsoft Unified Communications
followed them wherever they were.”
As a result, YES Prep opened its schools a
week earlier than any other school district
in the Hurricane Ike zone. “Our ability to
do this had a very real impact on the lives
of our students,” says Charlesworth.
Supports Curriculum Quality
Curriculum development has moved from
dedicated personnel in the central office to
a virtual team of full-time teachers from
across the district, who use unified
communications plus team collaboration
spaces based on Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007. Without the
technology tools, the full-time teachers
would seldom if ever have the time to
meet at a central location for this purpose.
“Our teachers hold virtual meetings and
independently complete work that they
share with others,” says Charlesworth.
“They test curriculum in their classrooms
and bring the results back to the virtual
team. Because they’re full-time teachers,
they’re closest to our students and in the
best position to understand what they
need. The teachers have produced
curriculum of astonishing quality, and they
couldn’t have done it without unified
communications.”