What is said to be the UK's largest educational Open Source email system was switched on last week in the county Carmarthenshire in Wales.
The system will provide IMAP e-mail access in both the English and Welsh language to fifteen secondary schools and 125 primary schools. That amounts to 40.000 potential users, according to a case study of the system by Open Source IT service provider Sirius. The company considers the bilingual capabilities of the e-mail system one of the advantages of Open Source software. Such kind of applications can be adapted to work in any language.
According to Sirius, the County Council selected Open Source software because it would be secure, customisable and scalable.
The school email system in Carmarthenshire is built on servers running Debian GNU/Linux. The system offers three versions of webmail, depending on the level of access given to each user. Primary school children, for example, can send e-mail using a simple interface whilst secondary school pupils can be given access to more advanced features. The system can also be configured to control sending to or receiving e-mail from unauthorised Internet users.
User administration is done with GOSA, an Open Source application for managing users, groups, e-mail, mailing lists and other services. The German city of Munich also uses GOSA. This tool, written in Open Source language PHP and accessible through a web browser, manages user accounts and services by using an LDAP database. This open standard is a technical specification for administrating access of users to IT resources in a network.
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Further information:
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Gosa (Open Source user account management application)