IBM Lotus Connections at the Novgorod state university of Yaroslav the Wise

IBM and the Novgorod State University of Yaroslav the Wise announced in October, 2011 project completion on creation of the social network of the university integrating 15 thousand students and 3 thousand teachers based on IBM Lotus Connections. Implementation of new features of social services among which community, forums, tasks, the Wiki, tabs, will allow students and the staff of the university to provide a continued access to knowledge bases, to interact effectively with colleagues and to keep joint educational and research projects.

The project was implemented by forces of the business partner of IBM, Dzhinus Tekhnolodzhis company.

The Novgorod State University - the state educational institution, largest in the Novgorod region. Implementation of Lotus Connections is a new stage of development of a corporate portal of NOVGU constructed based on OpenSource of technologies (PHP, MySQL). The portal is uniform access point to all university databases and information systems (personnel department, schedules, training materials, orders, purchases, etc.). Daily the portal of NOVGU is visited by more than 4.5 thousand unique users.

"Implementation of social network – an important step to strategy implementations on development of educational and research network of the university, - Nikolay Vasilyevich Kurmyshev, the vice rector for informatization of NOVGU of Yaroslav the Wise told. - Within this project we solved a key problem – received the effective tool for preserving and knowledge transfer. The social network based on IBM Lotus Connections technologies provides the continuous, personalized information exchange, increasing efficiency of interaction of students and staff of the university".

Before implementation of Lotus Connections social functions of the portal were limited to blogs, personal files and profiles. Integration of Lotus Connections allowed to add such functions as communities, forums, tasks, the Wiki, tabs and also to expand possibilities of blogs and file storage. Thanks to the built-in mobile version of Lotus Connections users of the portal had an opportunity to communicate via mobile devices. The multilingual Lotus Connections interface allows to expand borders of scientific cooperation and to attract to it the international scientific resources.

"IBM actively cooperates with the universities around the world, constantly finding new opportunities for development of science and education, - Sergey Belov, the head of university programs, IBM CEE & MEA noted. - The project implemented at the Novgorod University of Yaroslav the Wise shows advantages of such cooperation to creation of new technology environments of work with information which it will become unconditional the important assistant in scientific research and educational process of 21 centuries"

For management of multimedia educational content (audio, video, the presentations, documents) the Genus Media Upshot system developed by Dzhinus Tekhnolodzhis company is installed. Integration of Media Upshot with Lotus Connections (the Files application is modified) and the portal of NOVGU is made.

Process of integration included installation of Lotus Connections; setup of work with OpenLDAP; preparation of a kernel of the portal (PHP, MySQL) to integration (completion of modules, portlets, API); processing of design of Connections according to the portal of NOVGU; integration of user profiles (more than 65000 profiles of students, employees and graduates are imported), development of widgets for information display from the portal; creation of scripts for synchronization of information between subsystems in real time.

In development plans for the portal - holding the training seminars for users, development of the regulating documents.