Dubai Women's College deploys advanced learning environment based on Microsoft technologies

The rich collaboration solution includes a wide range of services that will be made available to the entire campus population of some 2,500 users.

"This is one of the largest e-learning deployment projects in the region. The solution provides a rich collaboration platform that enables students, faculty and staff to collaborate in real time, wherever they are. The platform is fundamental to supporting our technologically-rich learning environment at the college," Dr Howard Reed, Director of DWC explained.

Dr Reed explained that Dubai Women's College takes a proactive approach to the use of IT in education. All of the staff and students have laptop PCs, as part of an initiative so that lessons and college services can be delivered online. The new collaboration environment provides the central platform to help the college realize this vision, and builds on the existing shared services.

The new platform provides a wide range of services for users, including calendar sharing, resource booking, scheduling, application sharing, video and voice chat, net meetings, junk email filtering, instant messaging including remote assistance, and shared workspaces for meetings, teams and documents. All of the functions are integrated through Office 2003, providing the user with a familiar interface. SharePoint Portal services allows users to access the system from on campus and on remote, allowing users to get the most out of their laptops.

The project was initiated in May 2002, with the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Microsoft and DWC, to develop the project vision, scope, design, knowledge transfer and support. Microsoft partner SunTech Solutions provided initial designs for active directory and knowledge transfer to enable the college's own IT staff to drive the solution forward.

"At the time the project was initiated we had no hardware and very limited experience with Microsoft server technologies. SunTech assisted with the knowledge transfer, which was based on Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000, but our staff took that knowledge and implemented the solution on 2003 technologies without needing any additional help from the partner," Dr Reed said. "Microsoft was instrumental in listening to what we wanted to accomplish in terms of our laptop initiative, project-based, authentic learning environment. Other vendors did not provide the same vision or a solution to match our vision," he added.

The solution is built on Microsoft Windows 2003, Exchange 2003, Live Communications Server, SharePoint Portal Services 2.0 and Office 2003, and is hosted on a Microsoft server cluster, for added reliability and high availability. The project has been rolled out to the entire campus for the start of the new school year this month.

"This collaboration platform provides many more opportunities for faculty and students at DWC to work together on learning projects, and gives the students first-hand experience of using an advanced technology solution, to prepare them for the modern business environment," said Abdulatif Al Mulla, General Manager, Microsoft South Gulf.

"Training on the platform is straightforward, because the solution is built on familiar Microsoft technologies, and can be done in hours, compared to days for other collaborative environments. Microsoft is very proud that our technologies are being used by DWC to help staff and students to realize their full potential through powerful educational tools," Al Mulla added.