Shown Above: The 2006 winning Computer User's Guide cover.

As students arrive and move into residene halls at Northwest Missouri State University for the fall 2007 trimester, students living in Cooper and Franken residence halls will find that the traditional land-line telephone service has been replaced with a more high- tech communication resource, a Voice-Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) called VoicePage from www.carrieraccess.com.

VoIP is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network. VoicePage VoIP works like a regular telephone, but is accessed through the internet (http://voip.nwmissouri.edu/).

Students participating in the pilot program will receive a headset with receiver, instead of a handheld receiver associated with a traditional telephone, which will allow them essentially hands-free communication capability. The other features of VoicePage VOIP need only a keyboard and mouse to utilize.

Cooper and Franken residents are part of a pilot program to test VoicePage VoIP, the first such pilot of its kind in the nation.

According to Sam Hall, Spokesperson for VoicePage (Carrier Access), Northwest is essentially VoicePage's "BETA test for the world."