About The Web Portal project

About The Portal version 1.0
The SMJK Education portal (www.smjk.edu.my) is a specially designed web portal for all the 78 SMJK schools in Malaysia. The Web portal was initially funding by Tan Sri Lee Kim Yew’s Hua Education Fund. It is a school community, spread all over the 13 states in Malaysia, where there are around 7,500 teachers & administrators and 130,000 students from the 78 schools. All schools participated will get their own dynamically maintained web site hosted on the portal through a Content Management System. Initially all the school teachers and Administrators will be provided with email address, they can communicate with each other through the portal to share teaching experience, problems, teaching content etc.

The education web portal also provide disk space for schools to upload their multimedia teaching material so that all schools in the community will have a chance to use it in their schools. There are also forum, chatting facilities provided for special interest group to share ideas. Perridot Systems developed the whole project as well as managing the servers at its co-location data centre. The Project was self-funded by all the schools involved, where a yearly subscription fee was paid for the support service and servers hosting.

The Web Portal was first launched in March 2003, with a mail server of 104 GB of SCSI disk space, where every one of the teachers from the participating schools was initially given 20MB mailbox, for their internal communications.

Being a Pop3 mail implementation, the school users has the choice to use a PC email client to retrieve their mails or through a web-mail interface.

The Implementation of the School Management Systems

In 2005, the 78 schools also received funding from Huaren Foundation of MCA to purchased and installed Perridot Systems‘ School Management Systems. Under this sponsorship, 62 of the SMJK Schools signed up for the implementation, where every school was given a Dell server, a 3Com switch & Router and five modules of the School Management Systems.

With the implementation of the School Management System, apart from the teachers, who had greatly benefited from the automated administrative functions, students and parents can also access to all the students information like attendance, library books, discipline, examination results and co-curriculum activities.

Operation requirements and Short comings
The email servers, being more than 3 years old, and with very limited mailbox size, was not able to cater for the day-to-day’s operation requirements for the teachers.

For Teachers, they have to deal with very large file attachments in Circulars, Guidelines, and Teaching Contents in their emails. The existing 20MB mailbox space is just not able to cope with such traffic and file volume.

The aging server, with the limited 104 GB disk space, is also not able to extend the service to the students and parents. Most students and parents resorted to the free public email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail / MSN, and GMail, some were using the few email services provided by the ISPs like TMNet and Jaring.

Web Portal 2.0
In the later half of 2006, with the exploding growth of Web 2,0 applications, the SMJK Council had decided to upgrade the existing Web Portal with Web 2.0 features, to take advantages of the many benefits and to improve further their administrative, collaboration and social community efforts among the teachers, students and parents.