This new product is the latest addition to the other major Megabyte branded offerings, which include ID Solutions, Payroll, Human Resource Management System, Airline Route Profitability Solutions, to name but a few.

Product Overview

The Megabyte Course and Administration System is the result of a number of initiatives that Megabyte is active in, in helping to bridge the digital divide in Malta. Seeing that various private and public teaching institutions, including local councils, are active in delivering ICT awareness courses and IT skill dissemination programmes, Megabyte commissioned this innovative product to satisfy a new need in our fledgling Information based society.

Capitalising on a number of years experience in the Education sector, in designing this new product, Megabyte application architects, sought to make full use of the power of the Internet to facilitate any type of:

• Course booking on-line

• matching of class timing

• matching of class size

• matching teacher/tutor pool sizes

• Class administration

• Office administrative tasks

The system is designed in such a way that its provides specific functionality to Course intake staff and administrators, alike, from any location, even from home, It also enables tutors to update their availability to ongoing course programme changes from anywhere, as long as they have access to a PC and DSL line.

A full-blown eSolution

The Megabyte Course Booking and Administration System is a fully fledged web based system. It includes a number of functions and features that allow for delivery in widely dispersed course outlets. Functions available over the web include the input of course registrations and individual applications for any Course, allowing the individual to specify his/her preferred day of the week and the time that he/she would like to attend.

Main functionality includes:

• the definition of venues where courses are to be held

• the definition of laboratories within the venues where courses are to be held

• the definition of teachers and allocation of teachers to scheduled courses

• the definition of scheduled courses

• the booking of applications to scheduled courses according the preferred day specified by the applicant.

• generation of letters to applicants confirming their place within a scheduled course.
  various statistical reports.

Other enhancements to the Course Booking and Administration Solution are also available and these include:

• special venues that provide facilities for the disabled. This will allow applicants with special needs to be placed in the venues that have facilities for these citizens.

• the implementation of sophisticated user-friendly teacher allocation module.
  

A Cost Effective packaged service

In line with an ever-increasing trend to provide software on tap, Megabyte is offering this new solution in a way that will not involve major capital outlay to the school or institution.

In fact, apart from the cost of any special customisation requirements and PC costs, customers do not need to invest in a costly back-end server system or dedicated bandwidth, as Megabyte is offering the solution as a hosted application server. The customer pays for the application usage and overall administration, on a monthly basis. For the purpose, a special service level contract has been drawn up to cater for this new method of application delivery.

The Course Booking and Application System was developed using the latest Java development tools and runs on any database. Front-end usage is through a normal web browser in a thin-client environment.

Megabyte Web Security technologists have gone to great lengths to ensure that this applications runs on a secure web based operation. In real life operation, the system can only be accessed via a named user code and password according to client established access policies. It is backed by a web-based Security Application that allows the system administrator to create user accounts and customise these so that specific user related functionality can be enabled and disabled according to need.