Planning for the installation was the most complex part of the entire effort. It probably would not have been possible without a face-to-face meeting of all involved parties (which actually took place prior to the issuance of the purchase order, adding pressure for interested parties to attend). Attending were: Kenyon and Denison network staff, telecommunications management, Mellon grant director, and media services staff. They were joined by technical and sales representatives of Tandberg, representatives from Kenyon's local telephone provider who also support Kenyon's Nortel phone switch, and a representative from Cisco who spoke to Denison's networking plans. Without such a meeting, it is doubtful that the installation would have been even as "smooth" as it was.
Software in Kenyon's telephone switch had to be upgraded to allow ISDN services to pass through to the videoconferencing systems, but in addition, it was clear that Kenyon could save money by converting all incoming trunk lines for both phone as well as video and other data to ISDN lines. This larger project then became part of the videoconferencing project which added complexity but in the end, will save the college significant trunking costs.
At Denison, the local telephone company installed ISDN lines that bypassed the campus telephone switch and went directly to the classroom.
At neither Kenyon or Denison is it currently possible to log long distance phone call costs on the ISDN lines through our routine long distance management systems. Kenyon's authorization codes are suffixes to calls and suffixes cannot be used with the Tandberg systems. Prefixes can be used by the Tandberg system but would not be easily tracked. Both campuses have agreed to underwrite the costs of long distance services for videoconferencing during the first year to 18 months of operations as a way of encouraging departments' experimentation.
Room renovations are site-specific issues, but the details of the renovations at Kenyon are available as examples.
Continue on to the operations phase of this report.