The CERT 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 CERT staff, teachers, students, parents, and the Internet community at large.
The portal is to be the ministry’s overhauled communication and service 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 e-learning within UAE education system; starting with 50 schools, Al Ghad Schools.
The CERT 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 CERT portal. The MLG framework itself should be easily scaled to meet the future planned roll outs of elearning into the rest of UAE schools.
ITWORX was selected among a consortium commissioned to deliver an integrated solution to the CERT 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 CERT 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, CERT 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 and feel are much easier and more attractive. In addition, being built on MOSS 2007, the CERT portal has powerful content management capabilities that facilitate knowledge sharing and propagation and document management. To establish consistency, ITWORX consulted CERT 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 CERT entrusted them with MLG 2007 deployment to serve 50 schools; namely Al Ghad Schools. ITWORX leveraged the existing Microsoft-based infrastructure to deploy the MLG framework that is hosted within CERT data center. In addition, and according to CERT requirements, the MLG was linked and made accessible through the CERT 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 CERT 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 users activation cycle.
