5th of May 2006

Dear it@ab Alumni, dear it@ab Senior Partner,

As announced last week, the InWEnt it@ab Alumni workshop will start soon (June 7th -12th 2006 in Mozambique). I'm very happy to announce that InWEnt asked me to run technical and logistical preparations from the German side for this workshop. This is a great chance to meet many of you again in one of your countries. We are committed to making the workshop a useful one for you – with a focus on topics close to it@ab and a strong component on networking and knowledge exchange among the different years of it@ab programmes.

Concerning the workshop schedule, we would like to continue our interaction with you – thanks for all those who have already sent us their ideas. In addition and more specifically, we would like to get some more ideas on topics which you would like to have on the agenda Also, we are working towards making this workshop an interactive one. Therefore: If you have a topic that you would like to present or of which you would like to learn more, let us know as follows. We need this soon to embed your topic into our planning (There will be topics where we all can join in one training team, however on others we might have to split the groups).

Please send us (deadline May 10th):
* a brief description about your topic (topic of interest / topic of presentation)
* the time frame you estimate l the max amount of participants
* equirements to run your presentation, if applicable (hardware, online access etc).
Two inputs from Nelson Chamba from Mozambique and Fausta Nguzo from Tanzania are already available.

From our side we are working on the following topics based on your input and experiences in the past programmes:

LPI certification Ubuntu will join the LPI certification. We think that we should be among the first using it. Our idea is to provide you with eLearning information to train yourself to become LPI certified. Additionally those of you helping us with the eLearning platform could build their own mirrors out of this platform to sell it to your own customers. You may upload our LPI online training to any of your SCORM compliant platforms like CLE, Moodle or Kewl and offer access to your customers. If you want to join this project, let us know in advance, because we want to start the online phase already prior the workshop. If you just want to use it for yourself, enjoy the demonstration during our workshop.

Migrating to DebianMany of you have not used the Debian distribution yet. We will bring you latest DVD's and show you how to install/configure it. Last year we have distributed hard disks with the latest Debian mirror. Ask your Senior to give you this HD that we can update it during the workshop. Additionally we add the latest Ubuntu mirror onto your disk.

Using Ubuntu.
Ubuntu fits nicely into our Debian based OSS scenario. It's the most used distribution by now and it is supported out of Africa. That's the reason why we think it's very interesting for you to become familiar with it. In June we expect latest version Dapper Drake to be distributed. We will have it ready for you.

Building a Mail server gateway
between your existing MS Exchange server (or others) and your ISP to filter incoming mails and free them from Spam and infected malware. This business model can save you a lot of money, because you don't have to pay for additional expensive proprietary software on MS servers. Using this solution does not need many changes into your existing IT infrastructure.


Using OpenVPN for wireless accessipCop firewall/router has got a nice plug in to add OpenVPN to wireless access points. This is considered to be the only real secure scenario to run wireless. Our workshop can demonstrate this wireless technology during training. (That’s why we want you to bring your wireless equipment with you).

l Going virtual
Virtual machines are an upcoming topic in IT business. Computers spend a lot of time by idling. Why not use modern machines to hook several guest Operating Systems onto your host system. We will demonstrate this technique with the free VMWare Server. You will be able to run several OS simultaneously. If you want to test MS running in your Debian environment, bring in any of your CD's (Winnt, W2K or XP). We have Ubuntu and latest Knoppix for you to host them all in one system.

Community Project
You all know St. Ursula Gymnasium in Freiburg. Linux Terminal Server is running now with 17“ monitors. Students are very happy that they can use those machines. We have frozen all settings, no student may change anything. (This brings down TCO). We would like to demonstrate this solution during the workshop. We will transfer it from a German environment to a Portuguese environment. If we're done, we will donate some clients and a server to a school in Maputo. It's up to our it@ab experts from Maputo to find a school. We will drive there together to hand over our small project.

We hope you like our ideas. Feel free to give us feedback. A forum will be opened in a few days where you can exchange information among each other. We hope you use it intensively. See www.a-2-a.net for details.

One last comment:
EMail is our primary communication channel. Unfortunately, many addresses are no longer valid. That's why InWEnt set up a database – which will also be most important for future communication with you (see our communication of “1st InWEnt it@ab Alumni Workshop 2006 in Mozambique” from the 25th of 04.2006– attached for ease of reference). The following list indicates who already signed in. Please check this list to find other members who are not yet in. We need your help to contact those people to update our list. The Malawi ladies did a great job yesterday. Most entries are from there. Thanks a lot, hope we can extend this to the other countries.

regards
HPM with warm greetings from the it-inwent Team