Hahn & Hessen LLP is a distinguished mid-sized law firm with its headquarters in New York City and a smaller office in Albany, New York. The firm was moving its offices to a new location in midtown Manhattan and urgently needed to decide whether to move their obsolete PBX, invest in more legacy equipment or move ahead with an IP Telephony implementation. Their decision: to consolidate voice and data networks and to invest in the new technology. Hahn & Hessen chose Cisco IP Telephony as their strategic voice technology and retained Greenwich Technology Partners (GTP), a Cisco IP Telephony Specialization Certified partner, to design and deploy the solution.

The firm’s decision required a rapid move from an antiquated PBX to a suite of the latest telephony applications. The new network infrastructure took them from a flat, single-subnet LAN to a layer 3-switched topology, segregated into multiple VLANs for QoS and security purposes. The project also included a VPN and PIX firewall component, as well as wireless LAN technology. In addition, all of these applications had to be integrated into an existing Windows 2000 Active Directory environment. This project required expertise with the nuances of Microsoft’s Active Directory Services and tight integration with Exchange e-mail functions.

The most difficult aspect of this transition was that because of the impending move, we were operating in an environment in which a number of things were happening at once. Maintaining connectivity back to Hahn & Hessen’s Microsoft Active Directory structure as we built and moved the new data center was a major challenge.

We did the installation in a three-phased approach. First, we performed the original Active Directory integration with Cisco’s IP Telephony applications at Hahn & Hessen’s old office. This allowed us to get the applications integrated to the Active Directory environment and perform a great deal of system configuration before the data center in the new site was completely ready for occupancy.

Next, we moved the equipment and set up a VPN tunnel between the old and new sites to maintain connectivity.

And finally, once we had moved Hahn & Hessen’s domain controllers into the new site, we tested everything. The ability for all parties to be flexible and perform as a team, as well as the extra effort required to meet the deadline imposed by the move, were critical success factors in this implementation.

The Solution
The result was a fully integrated implementation of Cisco IP Telephony products including:

* Call Manager, an enterprise-class softswitch
* Unity unified messaging
* Personal Assistant, which includes find me/follow me, one number and speech recognition features
* Conference Connection for reservation-based conference calling
* Third-party party Forced Account Codes
* Microsoft Exchange features

Thorough preparation and testing guaranteed a smooth migration to the completed solution. Hahn & Hessen’s IT manager desired to be as self-sufficient as practical in the maintenance of the systems; so time was budgeted to the project to provide system administration training, in addition to the more informal training and knowledge transfer that was provided during the initial configuration phase at our facility.

The final cutover was scheduled over a weekend with a limited window for service interruption. All servers and workstations were moved from the old location. All carrier services, including DID (Direct Inward Dial) telephone numbers were rerouted, new public IP addresses were mapped to remote services, and all major services and functions were available to users well before the Monday morning deadline.

Net Result
Hahn & Hessen’s decision to migrate to an IP Telephony system across the entire organization made it the first law firm to do so on an end-to-end basis in New York City. What appealed most to the firm was the fact that the architecture was so open. They saw it as a plus that they were now able to add functionality such as the Personal Assistant by simply running applications on top of the infrastructure that they had built. They felt that it would be the kind of platform that they could grow into and onto which they could layer future applications.

Successful Outcome
Hahn & Hessen is already gaining many benefits from this converged solution, including ease of use, an edge in facilitating customer response and a mitigation of general operational costs. They now have a platform for hosting enhanced functionality for all of their future voice, data and web-based applications. In addition, the firm expects to see significant savings and increased control over their IT infrastructure from this implementation.

About our author . . .

Christopher Kearney is the Convergence Practice Director for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading provider of infrastructure architecture services.  He has 13 years of industry experience as an engineer and manager in the emerging technologies of IP Telephony and voice networks. Visit www.greenwichtech.com for more information. Christopher can be reached at ckearney@greenwichtech.com.