We’re currently exploring the option of discontinuing our telephony server to reduce costs associated with server and card replacement. As part of this transition, we’re considering promoting the use of email as the primary communication method with our patrons.
We’re curious to hear from others who have already made the decision to stop using telephony altogether. What has been your experience with this transition? How did you handle patrons who don’t have email?
Additionally, we would appreciate any advice on related ILS settings that should be reviewed or changed during this process. Thank you in advance for any words of wisdom you can share.
We decided to keep the Polaris Telephony server here at Finger Lakes Library System since the ongoing cost is just the III Annual maintenance. Since our Telephony server was very long in the tooth (2008) and had gone thorugh an OS upgrade to 2012R2. I was able to source an inexpensive Dell server from https://www.stikc.com/ with a full height PCI-e slot (required), loaded Server 2019 and just moved the original Dialogics card after prep during a Polaris upgrade. Our outbound calls aren’t enough to incur any additional cost from our phone service provider.
Hope this helps,
Rex Helwig
Finger Lakes Library System
We are sticking with it. We ran into major issues about a year ago when the county moved us to Microsoft 365 - - we are having email issues still so telephone has been a reliable plan B.
The little consortium I’m with had to retire our telephony server recently (i-tiva), and we decided there are just too many patrons still using phone notices because they have no access to email outside the library. For equity we’re keeping the service. We migrated phone notices to UMS MessageBee last summer, and so far we’ve had a good experience with it.