The story of Institute’s website & email service
(Compiled by Anshuman Singh, Electrical 1998)
Be it the updates on research, course content, placement statistics or even the last date of GATE interview – it is invariably the Institute’s website that is referred to for such information. To top it all, the website is a significant input for college rankings done by many organizations. The Institute has always felt the need for having its own dynamic, regularly updated website but lack of trained man power and a designated group to carry out these activities has been a big hindrance.
In 2004, under Dr. A. K. Mukherjee of Applied Chemistry, the group of students took the initiative to set up www.itbhu.ac.in – the official website of the Institute. They reached out to various departments, gathered data and published it online. This voluntary effort helped the Institute set up its first website but regular updates were a big issue. Given the lack of email usage and the visibility of the team – most of the departments were not aware of who they should contact to update the websites.
In 2006, the group was formally christened as the Web Management Group (WMG) and Prof. Kak took over as its coordinator. In the winter of 2006, the volunteers decided to take a leap of faith and decentralize the website management. After a couple of months of hard work the system went live in June 2007. Today each department is in-charge of its own web section and is free to update the latest news and happenings in their department on their respective website.
The Director has requested each department to appoint one faculty member as the webmaster for the department and one non teaching staff for his support. Using the Content Management system and templates provided by the WMG, the work for the department web masters has become considerably easy.
Another significant achievement of the WMG has been in providing official email ids to faculty, students and some non teaching staff. So far faculty members had been relying on email accounts with Yahoo, Sify domain names and it created a problem for them when they had to contact their peers at an official level. Same was true for students reaching out to the Industry for their summer projects, placements, fundraising for events or even to academic institutions for higher studies.
Issues of guaranteed uptime, bandwidth costs and need for trained personnel to manage the system were the biggest bottle necks of hosting this service in the Institute. While hosting 2500+ email accounts with a service provider had huge recurring costs. It was at the same time that Google launched its Google Applications package which was offered free for Educational institutions. In the absence of Institute’s own Data Center the team decided that this was the best and the most cost effective way of providing email service.
Again, the third year and fourth year students under the guidance of Prof Kak and Dr. Mukherjee explored the solution and interfaced with the various departments to get relevant student/faculty data for account creation. A couple of students stayed back in the Institute during the scorching summers and worked through out the summers to ensure that when faculty and students came back after their summer vacations all of them had an official email accounts.
Today the system has more than 2500+ accounts. That is more than three times the accounts managed by the BHU computer center. All the faculty members, all students and a few non teaching staff avail this facility.
To further the use of email as a collaborative tool the WMG team provided multiple mailing lists like
[dot] [at] itbhu [dot] ac [dot] in – e.g. btech.ece04 to reach out to all fourth year B. Tech. students - faculty [dot] cse @ itbhu [dot] ac [dot] in – to reach all faculty members of CSE department
- kashiyatra @ itbhu [dot] ac [dot] in – to reach people related to KY.
- tprs05 @ itbhu [dot] ac [dot] in – for the training and placement representatives of all the departments
Mailing lists & special mail accounts for various conferences, events and festivals have been created and more can be created based on requests.
We request all alumni to visit the Institute’s website (www.itbhu.ac.in) and contact the relevant department provide your feedback.
