eMundus, an open source content management system (CMS) available on Joinup, is designed to help both universities and students in creating a simplified application procedures for Erasmus Mundus programmes. Erasmus Mundus is the European Commission’s cooperation and mobility programme in the field of higher education. Erasmus applicants can submit their application forms with attachments and follow-up the evaluation of their applications by logging on to their profile page.

eMundus is an integrated application platform with online profiles and  evaluators can easily assess the submitted documentation. eMundus also enables Erasmus programme coordinators to communicate with applicants and to help with finalising their applications. Coordinators can also edit a variety of pages, such the homepage and frequently asked questions.

The CMS was originally developed to serve Erasmus Mundus programmes; however its developers point out that “eMundus can be adapted to any kind of online application.” For example, Paris 1 University – Pantheon-Sorbonne uses it for temporary teaching and research recruitment while the French Embassy in the USA uses it for scholarship programmes.

eMundus’s first release was in September 2008.  The main features of the current version 3.5 include CMS functionalities, application forms, communication tools, user profiles as well as tools for evaluating and ranking applications. The developers plan to release next minor upgrade in September 2012 and a major one next year. They would like to include the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, an Internet protocol that email and other programs use to look up information from a server, and Apogee’s Java Runtime Environment integrations in the future release. 

eMundus on Joinup