Winter – Fall 2022

Technical Assistance for the Win Upgrade

Windows 10, Windows 7, Microsoft

50

Legal Prep Charter School

Legal Prep Charter Academy is a completely free, open-enrollment public high school that was founded in 2012 in the West Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago.  Legal Prep uses its unique law themed curriculum and culture of high expectations to cultivate compassion, self-motivation, and reflection in young adults who will be prepared to succeed at outstanding four-year colleges and universities.

The current VoIP Phone system which the Legal Prep Charter school was using was Access One and it was causing them issues with the phones and managing the phones was also difficult as their phone provider didn’t have an easy to use interface to manage them.

Also the current VoIP system was not up to the current technology standards and there are other cost effective VoIP solutions which can be managed effectively and also have really low maintenance as compared to the current one which they have.

So they decided to contact us for better VoIP phone systems and we suggested Nextiva which is easy to manage and cost effective. Also we had to make sure that we could migrate them from Access One to Nextiva and their phones were compatible with the Nextiva configuration.

Starting off with the project, there was a call with Nextiva and the point of contact from Legal Prep to make sure we have the correct requirements in place and what the client is expecting from this project and how we can implement the project.

The next step was to get the network settings configured in the Firewall configured for Nextiva and make sure to check the switch configurations so that we can implement a VLan for the VoIP system to have the network streamlined.

An existing phone was checked with Nextiva settings and once that was confirmed we got the phone credentials information from the school. A date for testing it out the data ports was confirmed and the ports were tested out and the next step was to configure all the phones with nextiva settings.

The nextiva configuration was confirmed on all the phones and phones were tested out to see as to how they were performing. The switch configurations were backed up because we setup a VLan on the server for the VoIP phones so that requests over the network were routed correctly. The VLan was configured for the phones and they were connected to the VoIP VLan ports. Other network side configurations such as making sure the phone IP Address is from the VoIP Vlan and the VoIP VLan communicates with the staff VLan and also to verify the network structure after the VLan was setup was done.

The other devices on the network such as workstations, desktops, copiers and printers were verified and a logical diagram was created using Microsoft Visio to have the current network structure handy for future projects and a copy of the diagram was given to the school for their reference. Final configuration on the switches was saved after everything was verified.

This project has enabled the school to have less issues or support requests for their phones, having an easy to manage VoIP phone systems which they can manage after the project is complete, and having a cost-effective phone system.

After the VLan was configured for the VoIP phone system, they have a streamlined network structure so that all the requests over the network are routed correctly.