The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Education (MOE) serves a wide base of users including students,
parents, teachers, and ministry employees across its seven emirates. The MOE devised its strategy to rise
to the highest level of global excellence in education and advance the quality of services provided by the
education sector.
The MOE is adopting a student-centric approach to learning and is building an innovative education system
that equips all students with the knowledge and skills to be the productive citizens of the 21st century.
The MOE seeks to streamline its systems, services, and processes to enable efficiencies within its principal
stakeholders through technology. An initial step is an education portal that acts as a hub to provide
information and services to MOE staff, teachers, students, parents, and the Internet community at large.
The portal is to be the ministry’s overhauled communication and delivery channel that targets the
improvement of the quality of education services and stresses the pivotal role of the UAE government
efforts in investing in the education arena.
The aspired powerful online presence is complemented by a strategic initiative that envisions integrating elearning
within UAE education system; starting with 50 schools, El Ghad Schools. The MOE will adopt the
proven education framework MLG (Microsoft Learning Gateway) 2007 as their web-based learning
platform. MLG users (teachers, students, and parents) should be able to access the MLG through the MOE
portal. The MLG framework itself should be easily scaled to meet the future planned roll outs of e-learning
into the rest of UAE schools.
ITWORX was selected among a consortium commissioned to deliver an integrated solution, to the MOE,
based on Microsoft technology infrastructure. ITWORX was tasked with gathering and analyzing
requirements, creating the solution design and architecture, developing selected functionalities as well as
testing for performance tuning, security, integration, and production, in addition to post deployment
solution support.
To emphasize communication and information exchange, and by using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
(MOSS) 2007 capabilities, ITWORX underscored MOE direction to provide online services via the portal.
ITWORX developed a set of e-forms that provide a flexible way of interaction between portal users, MOE
employees, and content owners- using a defined workflow for content approval and publishing. The e-forms
enable different user groups, according to authentication levels, to obtain different online services and
information such as asking the minister, inquiring about payroll details, scheduling a teacher meeting, or
requesting to borrow educational material.
Using Microsoft Silverlight, ITWORX customized the bilingual portal to ensure that usability and look & feel
are much easier and more attractive. In addition, being built on MOSS 2007, the MOE portal has powerful
content management capabilities that facilitate knowledge sharing and propagation, and document
management. To establish consistency, ITWORX consulted MOE on best practices to amass a set of standards
and guidelines to be used in developing and populating content that is published on the portal.
Having witnessed ITWORX industry domain expertise first-hand, the MOE entrusted them with MLG 2007
deployment to serve 50 schools; namely El Ghad Schools. ITWORX leveraged the existing Microsoft-based
infrastructure to deploy the MLG framework that is hosted within MOE data center. In addition, and
according to MOE requirements, the MLG was linked and made accessible through the MOE portal; creating
a fully connected learning community.
ITWORX also delivered MLG consultancy and trainings to assist 80 school teachers to easily adopt the system
and transfer their newly acquired know-how to other teachers in their respective schools.
ITWORX team managed to provision portal users through performing a smooth migration of school teachers
and students information from the existing MOE back-end systems. This process entailed the use and
customization of both SQL Server Integration Services and Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) for
provisioning users into Active Directory and completing their activation cycle.
Online services boost interaction with MOE
Aligning with the UAE strategy to avail citizen-centric services on the Internet, the MOE puts new online
services in the palm of its stakeholders. The MOE portal architecture is scalable and designed to incorporate
new informational, financial, and administrative services that support and connect the education
community; catering for the needs of MOE employees, teachers, principles, students, parents, and the
general public.
E-learning transforms the educational experience
To meet the best universal educational standards, the MOE puts the school back into the heart of the
community by implementing a technological infrastructure that relies on modern techniques. Deploying
MLG in 50 schools is only a start point to integrate e-learning within the rest of UAE schools. With MLG
accessed through the MOE portal, students benefit from accelerated learning, teachers collaborate better
with their colleagues, and parents are able to monitor the progress of their children and communicate
directly with staff, giving the school a far more central role in family life.
Usability and stability attract wide range of audience
The MOE bilingual portal offers a simple and consistent user experience, with attractive graphics and a
professional look and feel. The portal and MLG deployments were subjected to vigorous and stringent
testing procedures. During the software development life cycle the testing included: requirements review
and testing, test plans creation, test cases writing, builds verification, bug testing, and new builds testing.
The testing extended to performance tuning, security, integration, and production to ensure that the
solution is available 24/7, protected, stable, and can handle massive numbers of online services. With easeof-use,
attractiveness, and security, the solution attracts more satisfied users around the clock.
