University faculty and staff are preparing for the final step of the Unified Communications program, enabling networked voice, chat and conference features that will replace all hardwired phone systems on Feb. 13.

To ease the transition, CITES hosted an event Wednesday called “Understanding UC Device Options”that allowed staff and faculty to examine various telephones and accessories that can support the Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, that will run the new centralized phone system.

According to CITES, users technically do not need to buy new phones to run the new software — they can place calls using the built-in audio capabilities of their computers — but many office environments require a degree of privacy and mobility when it comes to phone calls, necessitating that offices fully replace their phone technology.

“There are no specific technical problems with the current phone system,” said Tony Rimovsky, associate director of the program and director of Enterprise Infrastructure for CITES. “However, it is based on 50-year-old technology that provides no real integration with other forms of communication that are common in today’s world.”

VoIP is the same platform upon which Internet phone services are based, and Michael Miles, a biological safety professional at the University who attended Wednesday’s event, expressed concern for glitching and the “tinny” audio quality that mars other VoIP platforms like Skype and Google Voice.

As Miles examined various telephone accessories, he said he hoped there would be enough bandwidth to sustain the vast daily phone usage of the University’s thousands of employees.

However, Charley Kline, a University IT Architect, explained that several features of the Unified Communications system and campus network cooperate to make sure that phone calls remain reliable. The University network in particular is able to adapt itself around slowdown and errors to maintain audio quality.

“The specific digital encodings used by the UC system for voice and video have adaptive characteristics which cause them to lower network bandwidth in response to loss or ‘jitter,’” Kline said in an email. “The result is that voice fidelity becomes somewhat less good, but studies show that a lower-quality voice transmission that is intact is far more understandable than one that is chopped up or ‘glitchy.’”

Kline also added that the system has many built-in monitoring features that will allow administrators to study problems and address them in the future.

The voice features will be fully incorporated into the campus-wide directory, allowing voicemails to be forwarded to email inboxes, “available” and “away” statuses to be synced with a user’s calender schedule, and a simpler way of taking office calls from home.

“I see this as nothing but a plus,” said Art Westle, a staff member in the University office of capital programs and real estate services. Westle said he is most excited about the ability for his address book to be tapped into his colleagues’ schedules.

“You can see if that person is in a meeting or if he’s already on the phone. He can multitask, you can multitask, and you can be a lot more productive.”

Wednesday’s event was the first of a series of support sessions stretching into March to acclimate staff to the new system and allow them to ask questions of CITES staff. A full schedule of these events and further resources can be found at “http://www.cites.illinois.edu/uc/”:http://www.cites.illinois.edu/uc/.

“Overall, the UC project will provide a modern tool set that combines multiple communications methods that are valuable to the campus community with an overall annual cost savings,” Rimovsky said.

He added that there are currently no plans to expand the scope of the project to include undergraduate students.