IT for Afghanistan: German project supports the training of young IT professionals
Computing centers of universities in Afghanistan migrate to Univention
Bremen, September 25, 2014. Since 2002, the center for international and intercultural communication (ZiiK) at the Technical University Berlin (TU) supports universities in Afghanistan with building basic IT services and training IT specialists, students and lecturers.
Since the beginning of the project, more than 4,500 members of the universities’ staff and professionals as well as dozens of academic lecturers were trained. An essential factor for the project’s success was an easy administration and maintenance of the newly installed IT systems from the start without making any compromises when it comes to functions or security. Over the years many different systems had been tried and tested. The most recent computing center at the university of Kandahar has eventually been built on the basis of the enterprise Linux distribution Univention Corporate Server (UCS) by the German company Univention GmbH. After just six months, the good performance of UCS had convinced the persons in charge in Afghanistan and Germany: Until the end of 2015, the remaining four computing centers, which were set up by the Ziik, will have migrated completely to UCS.