[odf-discuss] ODF Adoption -- Google Apps for 200, 000 secondary school students in Malaysia

[marbux]

<http://computerworld.com.my/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=4521&pubid=4&issueid=109>

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Tiong Ting Ming, IT advisor at SMJK (Sekolah Menengah Jenis
Kebangsaan), which controls 78 schools in Malaysia, faced a number of
obstacles to upgrading its schools' IT infrastructure. The students
wanted a way to share documents, have personal school email accounts
and be connected to the school system for homework updates.
But funding was the biggest obstacle. Since the school group's IT
relied on the charity of external parties and organisations, it was
not about to upgrade its entire hardware architecture. In fact,
Microsoft licences for its Office suite were beginning to be a
problem, and the school turned to its open-source counterpart, Open
Office, instead.
However, Open Office required computing power they couldn't spare.
SMJK's computers, mostly Pentium IIIs, were unable to handle the
software, either crashing or behaving very sluggishly.
So Tiong turned to Google Apps Educational Edition, a free version
giving them 2GB of storage per user and a pledge from Google to supply
200,000 email accounts, after they wrote to Google with a plea.
Tiong estimates these accounts will last the organisation
approximately five years. More importantly, he estimates this set-up
will cost a mere eighth of an otherwise large expenditure of around
US$3 million-US$4 million with a traditional desktop software set-up.

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Note that Sekolah Menengah Jenis Kebangsaan is the administrative unit
for national seconary schools in Malaysia.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Malaysia>.