Services need to be linked across disperse geographical communities, and public sector IT needs to integrate complex systems to cover a wide variety of needs, such as health, education and planning. And some leading-edge authorities are already making headway. Lincolnshire County Council is using technology and content to help citizens from scattered communities to work and learn online.
NETLinc, the council's county-wide secure network, allows employees and students to become actively involved in creating, accessing and managing content. The network connects a host of public sector institutions, including schools and hospitals.
"The whole focus of the project is to reflect the geographical dispersal of the county's services," explained Geoff Chandler, project manager at Lincolnshire County Council. "We need to offer solutions that provide co-ordination and flexibility."
The project started in 1997. Two years later IT supplier Ramesys and Lincolnshire County Council started developing an online learning portal. The network has been rolled out to 381 schools, including 63 secondary schools.
NETLinc makes use of content management software from Ramesys to provide three types of IT solutions for Lincolnshire's schools: a fully-managed ISP service with support to routers; a distributed solution with support up to and including the server; and an infrastructure maintenance service.
Major funding streams for the project have included the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), National Grid for Learning (NGfL), New Opportunities and the European Union.
Broadband has been rolled out across the county's schools since 2001. The council also started to integrate other public sites to NETLinc two years ago, such as children's homes, teacher training colleges and hospitals.
More than 16,500 PCs are now joined to the network and are connected across 520 public sector sites.
"We're trying to build a community so that everyone is learning from each other, and access to content is king," said Chandler.
Schools are connected in a wide area network (Wan), and a NETLinc team in Lincoln manages the 70-server network. All schools connect to one central help desk provided by Ramesys in Nottingham.
Email access is supplied to teachers and pupils and NETLinc provides the biggest Microsoft Exchange environment in Europe, with more than 110,000 users. One million emails are delivered through the system every month.
Schools receive 2MB broadband links and access is filtered using specialist Symantec software. Mobile units with client laptops and other peripherals provide internet access for remote rural areas.
"We built an integrated infrastructure with a firewall and then we started focusing on delivering important areas, such as content," explained Chandler.
Content is accessed through a specially designed portal, a fully-managed online learning community developed by Lincolnshire County Council and Ramesys.
Portal services are either public or private, depending on the user and their location for accessing the intranet.
The portal allows head teachers to find relevant supply teachers by parameters, such as willingness to work and geographical location.
Registered head teachers can also use the system to check that potential employees have received police clearance. Head teachers can then send a job offer to each supply teacher by SMS text message.
"The idea is to save money," said Darren Pepper, content and e-services manager at Lincolnshire County Council.
"A head teacher can send out requests quickly by SMS, and it only costs a few pence to send a text message rather than making a mobile phone call."
Schools also have access to a range of learning content. Content is divided into subject areas and is available to a mixture of staff and students. Teachers see all information. Pupils, on the other hand, only see content that is directly related to them.
"The system we've developed is usable and intuitive and you can easily navigate around it," claimed Pepper. "Content can be authored by any pupils or teachers in a school."
The portal system accepts a wide range of materials, including HTML files, Word documents and hypertext links to websites. Teachers putting information into the system have their content checked by a peer review process.
The process provides constructive criticism and ensures that the downloaded content is appropriate for its specific subject area.
"If a teacher is putting something into the system, it should be good enough for everyone else in the county to see," said Pepper.
Although it is difficult to keep teachers up-to-date with what is available and how they can use it, the council's portal system provides information to staff in a timely manner, according to Eileen Davies, NETLinc content and training officer.
By putting news and links to web pages on the front page of the intranet, teachers are told of recent and relevant events. NETLinc also sends a newsletter to all staff through email.
"We want to manage everything electronically," said Davies. "The newsletter provides a short description of documents. It's quicker and less wasteful than sending and opening an envelope."
Other services on the NETLinc system allow staff and students to communicate and store information more effectively.
The portal allows children to search a database and email other students through a web client, either from school or elsewhere. The system also allows teachers and pupils to easily and securely transfer files.
Each user is allocated a certain amount of central disk space and files saved at school can be accessed remotely at home.
The council's network and the structure for content development are in place and future technology developments will concentrate on leading edge IT.
Chandler and his team are looking at emerging standards and are considering how telecom protocols can help develop the existing system. SMS text messaging is already being used to update the county's fully-managed education facilities.
"We want to develop lifelong learning and make it easier to access and share content," concluded Chandler.
Quelle: Network IT Week, 12.02.2004
