The International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM) is poised to embrace a new world of education excellence through the Unified Communication (UC) project with Microsoft. The initiative, which involves Microsoft’s 3K elements (communications, collaboration and culture), promises to revolutionise in-campus teaching and learning. Izwan Ismail writes.

COMMUNICATIONS on campus at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) will become more intuitive and convenient. The Microsoft unified communications offerings, namely Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007; and Windows Live@Edu, will provide IIUM with access to tools, programmes and resources to boost campus-wide communications.

According to IIUM’s director of information technology division director Adi Azmir Abdul Ghani, the initiative will improve internal communications among university staff, lecturers and students via integrated e-mail, telephony and instant messaging platforms.

“We see that there is huge communication problem between academicians and students. One of the tools to bridge this gap is through the usage of unified communications where the lecturers or students can be reached anywhere, anytime,” he said.

He said the use of the unified communications technology will allow IIUM’s 28,000 community to have access to e-mail, voice-, video- and Web-conferencing, and instant messaging (IM), into a single intuitive system, providing constant electronic presence.

The unified communications tools will also allow for real-time Internet-based confidential sharing of documents such as exam results, assignments, thesis, etc.

Unified communications technology will also allow academicians and lecturers to share calendars and schedule meeting electronically.

“Another issue that we see in the university is that there is a gap between the university environment and the outside world, in particular the enterprise ICT community. With this initiative, it can easily bridge the gap where we can provide students with a feel of what ICT is all about in the real world. Once the students graduate, they can easily work in any organisation using similar technology tools,” said Adi.

For university researchers, the unified communications tool can be used to collaborate with other researchers from other universities as well using basic communications tools for video-conferencing.

For long-distance learning, students and lecturers from our other branches do not have to waste time travelling to the main campus for classes.

“Even the senate meeting is now done via video-conferencing,” said Adi.



Infrastructure

To ensure that the initiative benefits the entire IIUM community at all four branches, the university has also installed a wireless infrastructure throughout the campus. By this October, the infrastructure will cover all the faculties and 60 per cent of IIUM’s community.

The university has spent RM5 million for phase one of the project, and in phase two it will look into providing wireless connectivity at the student hostel areas, making the university 100 per cent Wi-Fi-enabled.

On the students’ ability in accessing all the available unified communications technologies, Adi said it should not be a problem as 80 per cent of the students have notebook computers; and even if they don’t have one, they can use the many computer labs in the faculties.