Download

Letaba FET College

Letaba FET College is a Further Education and Training College with 2000 students and 160 employees. It is located in the North-Eastern part of the Mopani District in the Limpopo Province, Republic of South Africa.

Situation:

Letaba FET College consists of 3 campuses (Giyani, Maake, and Tzaneen) and a central office controlling activities at the campuses. It was planned to connect the 3 campuses’ sites to the central office through a wireless connection.

The classrooms and central offices were connected via a LAN to a central server running Windows Server 2003. The workstations were running Windows XP.

Recently, the National Department of Education introduced a new curriculum based on outcome-based education to prepare students for the work environment. As part of the assessment, the students must demonstrate skill in using the Internet in the form of the national exam; they are required to communicate via e-mail and have to look up sites over the Internet with following reporting.

With limited telecommunication infrastructure, the IT-educational procedure might become a nightmare since it was too complicated to accommodate all the students during the exams without a bandwidth shaper and statistical/reporting tools. It was necessary to have enough control to regulate the content that students accessed, and to protect them from unwanted and unlawful internet sites.

Solution:

The above challenges led Letaba College IT specialists to research available products to assist.

“We made use of a free-proxy server on a trial basis, but it did not provide us with sufficient control and protection. Different products were evaluated, but we finally decided to use UserGate: the most affordable solution we could find, very easy to implement and use, with a lot of control options, which we particularly needed.

With the proxy server and content control, it has become very easy to regulate bandwidth and Internet usage. Entensys also has offered a very generous education discount that helped us to deliver a quality, affordable education for our students coming from poor rural communities” Johan Venter, Management Information systems coordinator.

As a result of implementing UserGate, Internet resources are now fairly and evenly distributed. Johan Verner feels that the most valuable option is the ability to create different rules for different groups of users to manage various sets of regulations for students and staff. UserGate has provided Internet access to many students with its options for managing flexible settings and various means of control.


Back to Case Studies

Twitter