ShoreTel Helps Oakland Communicate During Natural Disasters

City expands ShoreTel deployment to 2000 phones for disaster planning and recovery and improved employee productivity

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 10 -- ShoreTel(R), Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOR) , a leading provider of Pure IP unified communications solutions, today announced that it has worked with the City of Oakland to expand its deployment of the ShoreTel IP telephony system to 2000 phones. The city initially deployed ShoreTel in March of 2005 and is using the unified communications platform to streamline communications, enhance productivity, and ensure calls go through even during natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and mudslides. ShoreTel provides a robust distributed architecture with no single point of failure, so it is well-suited to rapid failover and the re-routing of calls around problem areas.

Just across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland has seen its share of destruction from natural disasters. In 2005, when it was time to replace its aging PBX-based phone system, the city selected ShoreTel and deployed 500 phones. Finding that the system was highly reliable and easy to maintain, the city has since expanded the deployment to 2,000 phones in eight locations, including City Hall, two administrative annexes, the Municipal Service Center, the Emergency Operations Center, the Animal Shelter, the Family Criminal Justice Center, and the Oakland Museum. ShoreTel's desktop call control client, ShoreWare(R) Personal Call Manager, integrates with Microsoft(R) Outlook(R) to provide employees directory dialing, contact screen pop, and calendar integration. Oakland employees can now manage all their communications -- voicemail, email and faxes - centrally on their desktop.

"Our ShoreTel IP unified communications system has proven to be easy to configure and use, simple to manage, flexible, and extremely reliable," said Robert Glaze, Oakland's chief technology officer. "Our employees are very pleased with how ShoreTel's unified communications features have helped them be more productive and communicate more efficiently. And with our history of natural disasters, the distributed architecture and automatic failover of the ShoreTel system has been a perfect fit for us. It will keep our communications up and running even if we have to relocate several departments to temporary facilities."

ShoreTel's call control software is distributed to each voice switch in a geographically dispersed deployment, making ShoreTel more reliable than server-centric solutions. This appealed to the city of Oakland because it eliminates any single point of failure, and in the event a call switch is destroyed or employees need to be relocated, calls are easily rerouted, keeping communications open.

"ShoreTel delivers the best of all worlds - consistently clear and reliable phone calls, a distributed architecture for disaster recovery, and new unified communications capabilities for increased user productivity and satisfaction," said Steve Timmerman, vice president of marketing at ShoreTel. "Dispersed organizations like the city of Oakland value ShoreTel's flexible call routing and unified messaging, but they also recognize that the overall reliability of phone communications must be their top priority. Having proven itself in deployment after deployment, ShoreTel offers government agencies and enterprises a very dependable, cost-effective path to the future of communications."

About ShoreTel, Inc.

ShoreTel (NASDAQ:SHOR) is a leading provider of Pure IP unified communications solutions. ShoreTel voice systems provide customers with a number of key benefits, including ease of use, manageability and lower total cost of ownership than alternative solutions. ShoreTel's distributed software architecture and switched-based hardware platform extend enterprise-class voice services to every office and outpost, keeping employees fully connected wherever they go. Founded in 1996, ShoreTel has achieved broad industry recognition for its technology and high customer satisfaction. For the last four years, IT executives surveyed by Nemertes Research, an independent research firm, have rated ShoreTel highest in customer satisfaction among leading enterprise telecommunications systems providers. A select, worldwide group of channel partners provide service and support. ShoreTel is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in the United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit http://www.shoretel.com/ or call 1-877-80SHORE.