"Open-Xchange costs about 3 times less than the other groupware solutions that were investigated, taking into consideration hardware and software cost," said Mr. Laurent Evrard, the Director of Computer Services of the Polytechnic of Namibia.
The Polytechnic of Namibia is Namibia's de facto university of science and technology. It has a staff of 400 and offers certificates, diplomas, bachelor’s of technology and master’s degrees to its 7,000 students. The Polytechnic is a young but dynamic institution that is acknowledged as the national standard in technological education.
The Polytechnic of Namibia is driven by the belief that development (national or international) is based on knowledge and knowledge management. Academic institutions have always been key agents in the dissemination of knowledge. Since the advent of the Internet, the spread and management of knowledge have taken on a new meaning and "globalisation" is very much the norm nowadays result. The Polytechnic of Namibia has embarked on a path to constantly modernise the institution by making vast investments in curriculum development and the infrastructure. The institute strives to maintain a state of the art environment for new and innovative ways of teaching and learning, research and service.
The Challenge
The Polytechnic has been using electronic mail for faculty and students since the beginning of the Internet in Namibia. However, they had used no collaboration and groupware solutions. The institution needed to deliver higher level collaboration and groupware solutions that feature abilities such as: send and receive emails, groupware, manage shared folders, mailing lists, and calendaring features. Additionally, the Polytechnic wanted needs to find ways to introduce the benefits of shared calendars and tasks to university staff members. The Polytechnic IT staff had limited experience with collaboration and groupware solutions and was operating on a tight limited budget.
The Solution
The majority of The Polytechnic’s computing resources use flavours of Unix and Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and the institute wants easy interoperability between their collaboration platform and the email clients they already use. The Polytechnic does support several other Linux distributions, so the selected solution will must need to be installable on a wide variety of Linux distributions and hardware configurations. The selected solution has to easily integrate into existing client / user setups such as Outlook, and other mail user agents (MUA) such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Finally, an easy to use web mail interface was required.
Selecting Open-Xchange
The Polytechnic introduced its first staff test group of Open-Xchange in June 2006. The staff members were impressed by the functionality and ease of use of Open-Xchange during the trial period. This successful first test led to, in August 2006, the training of the full staff complement of the institution on Open-Xchange. This was for the majority of them (about 80%) the first time ever they used a collaboration software system. The full Open-Xchange project was driven in-house by the Polytechnic's own open source proponents. “The fact that Open-Xchange runs on Linux ensures that we will be using all modules provided by Open-Xchange in our current setup,” said Mr. Laurent Evrard, the Director of Computer Services of the Polytechnic of Namibia. "The easy web management interface is a major advantage, which reduces the number of hours spent on administration of the system and user management by about 50%."
Open-Xchange’s Impact
The results with Open-Xchange have been immediate and easily evident. “In line with our reputation as a reliable and state-of-the-art IT department, we would like to provide our users with a reliable, fast, secure and open collaboration and messaging solution”, said Mr. Evrard. “ Open-Xchange provides us with the ability to provide our users with a comfortable interface and easy access from anywhere in the world in a secure and stable environment, while the sharing abilities of Open-Xchange are fully in line with my idea that knowledge belongs to the world.”
Moving forward the Polytechnic plans to have all staff members using Open-Xchange by the end of 2006.
For additional information, please visit www.polytechnic.edu.na
