NEWS: Google Apps for Education - SMJK Schools

The 78 SMJK Schools in Malaysia, with a total student populations of 128,000 and 7,500 teachers and administrators, is partnering with Google to use Google Apps for Education, which includes Gmail to manage the SMJK student email accounts, as well as Google Calendar and Google Talk.

The new system brings many benefits to the 78 SMJK schools, both teachers and students, including indexed email search, enhanced spam filtering, calendaring, tagging capabilities for tracking emails, and a whopping two-Gigabyte quota per student for email storage.

The SMJK Schools is the first group of schools in Malaysia to implement Google Apps for Education.

Google had given approval to implement up to 200,000 Gmail accounts for the 78 schools

First large-scale deployment of Google Apps for Education in Malaysia

There are approximately 128,000 students and 7,500 teachers and administrators in the 78 SMJK Schools spread throughout the whole of Malaysia, and looking at the new intakes of 20,000 students annually, we would need around 200,000 accounts in the next three years of operations.

From the above requirement, for a total of 200,000 accounts, each with 2GB of mailbox, would make up a total of 400 Terabytes of disk space for the SMJK community.

Perridot Systems (www.perridot.com), an education software provider, had initially proposed to the SMJK Councils to adopt Google’s communication and collaboration tools to the SMJK community in July 2006. The strategic alliances with technology leaders like Google are keys to accelerating the contribution that technology can make to the SMJK community.

The SMJK Schools are always at the forefront of smart use of technology for education, having recently implemented Perridot Systems’ School Management Systems in 62 of the 78 schools in Malaysia in 2006, under an education funding given by Hua Ren Education Foundation.