Bahrain Polytechnic, a government-owned tertiary education institute, said it has signed a Microsoft Enrolment for Education Solutions (EES) agreement to provide students a practical hands-on experience so they can flourish in the workplace and promote Bahrain’s economic growth.

Mohamed Al Aseeri, Bahrain Polytechnic’s acting CEO, said: “We are thrilled to sign the EES agreement with Microsoft, a deal which will help us open new windows of opportunities to our students - Bahrain’s new generation of business leaders and workforce.”

He thanked Microsoft for their unceasing support and for their ongoing investment in the education sector in the Kingdom.

Through the EES agreement, Bahrain Polytechnic now has the needed technology to support their students and graduates with the means to carve out successful careers; this deal also helped free the IT directorate’s team from time consuming and costly maintenance and the management of IT directorate activities giving them more time to concentrate on other fundamental tasks.

Sherif Tawfik, regional general manager for Microsoft in Bahrain and Oman, said: “We are pleased with the decision of Bahrain Polytechnic to be the first educational institution in Bahrain to benefit from Microsoft EES agreement. We believe that innovation starts at this stage in our children’s lives; we applaud Bahrain Polytechnic’s efforts towards ensuring that their students have every chance to innovate and succeed during their studying years and beyond.”

“Our new licensing programme, (EES), is simple, smart and affordable, making it easier for Bahrain Polytechnic and other educational institutions to provide 21st Century learning,” he added.

Sameera Alatawi, ICT services director at Bahrain Polytechnic, said: “We essentially wanted a turn-key platform that would deliver easy management, always-on availability and could meet the growing storage needs to cope with the exponential increase in mailboxes without difficulty.”

She explained that both Office 365 and Microsoft Azure, as part of the EES agreement, are being used to address IT management issues and deliver educational services.

Office 365, with its enterprise-grade communication and productivity services such as Instant Messaging (IM) and SharePoint, allowed Bahrain Polytechnic to provide each staff member, student and graduate an email address with a 1GB mailbox, creating an online network to facilitate communications between students, their tutors and the institution. It also gave students remote access to their mailboxes and curriculum information from all mobile devices, irrespective of platform.

Azure, an open and flexible cloud platform, provided tutors the freedom and flexibility to easily and quickly create virtual labs in the cloud without consuming the time of IT staff or requiring hardware expenditure dropping the cost of creating teaching labs to zero.

“Office 365 and Azure are important technology platforms that are also helping us meet our wider strategic objectives of promoting national economic development,” Alatawi concluded.

The Microsoft Volume Licensing Enrolment for Education Solutions offering provides qualified academic institutions, of all sizes, a simplified way to acquire Microsoft software in a cost-effective way. -TradeArabia News Service