In 2001, as part of the "eLouxembourg" initiative to raise awareness and use of technology in education and business, the Luxembourg Ministry of Education commissioned the creation of a web-based "virtual digital learning place". The project was created to promote eLearning and ensure that children were computer literate by the time they left school.

The Luxembourg Ministry of Education's concept was simple: to provide the country's students with easy access to reliable, validated educational tools and content that would assist them with their studies. And with home PC penetration topping ninety percent in Luxembourg, the Web was considered an ideal medium to bring together these disparate sources of data within a single interface on the desktop.

The vision - or "mySchool" as it became known - did not end there. Ease of use, particularly with respect to navigating and searching for information, was absolutely critical if "mySchool" was to be a hit with students. In addition, there was a clever vision for collaboration among students, teachers, parents, employers, and information providers, all facilitated through this unified interface.

"We aim to democratize knowledge", says Daniel Weiler, General Portal Manager at "mySchool", CTE. "We wanted to build a virtual digital work-and-learning environment for the entire education community. "mySchool" needed to provide personalized information - from Web content to traditional applications. It needed to offer a single sign-on authorization and be as easy as possible for communities to search and find reliable information from disparate sources. We also wanted to offer collaboration and communication tools, together with intelligent alerting."

One of the first challenges was finding the appropriate application infrastructure to support "mySchool". Weiler and his team drew up some key requests, ranging from it being web-based, open and secure, to being flexible, scalable, and extensible. "We were looking for a standards-based development and portal framework", says Weiler. "An enterprise portal would help us deliver focused, pertinent information and applications to the entitled end-user through any device. Additional rich features of the enterprise portal include collaboration, content management, integration, workflow and process management, and search."

BEA AquaLogic User Interaction Suite proved the ideal basis to develop and roll out "mySchool". "The fact that BEA AquaLogic Interaction is open and standards based means that we aren't restricted in terms of content or the environment in which it is developed,- adds Weiler. "BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration also enables us to create shared workspaces where students and teachers can meet, communicate, and exchange and create content. The solution also enables qualified users to manage the interface of participants to control what they see on their screen."

From potential universe of 60,000 users, "mySchool" currently supports 30,000. Individual schools can create their own local intranet on "mySchool", providing a specific view of and access rights to the portal. "mySchool" now also incorporates a security and administrative framework for managing applications in separate domains, each with a separate audience - and a separate set of administrators. This enables local schools to manage their own portal environment effectively.

The visionary system has dramatically reduced the burden on "mySchool's" central planning and management team: just five people now manage the entire portal. In reality, this team is supported by a series of "content maintainers" based in local schools and charged with keeping the content up to date. Using BEA AquaLogic Interaction Publisher, content maintainers without web-programming skills can create, validate, and publish content across their local "mySchool" portals in a controlled, consistent way. From an administrative perspective, this localization represents a major breakthrough, as all content had previously been centrally created, managed, and updated for the entire portal.

"We strongly believe that by devolving ownership and responsibility to local schools and - in some cases - individual pupils, "mySchool" has been establishing itself as a principal education resource across Luxembourg", says Weiler.