The first Indian Energy University approved by UGC, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies has chosen the fast-track approach to deploy IT solutions across its three campuses.

Set up by eminent petroleum professionals in 2003, UPES offers over 33 graduate, post graduate and doctoral programs in petroleum to more than 2400 students across its campuses in Dehradun, Gurgaon and Rajahmundry (AP). Being a young and domain specific university, it needs policies that promote sustained educational excellence and resource optimization. Other challenges include working within tight budgets, employee retention, managing complexity, security, and compliance.

To standardize processes across various departments and to ensure timely and effective information flow, the university was quick to embrace the SAP solution for Higher Education & Research called SLCM (Student Life-cycle Management). This automates all processes related to the student life-cycle viz. student application & admission, academic calendar, academic structure, student accounting, grading and student progression through the program of study till graduation. One of the immediate benefits of the implementation was that employees who use the system actually bonded with the end-to-end process. For example, the enrolments officer realized the importance of creating a student record on time and the consequent impact on Finance, Academics and Student Records and Evaluation and the other departments of the University. Accountability also increased as the entire system became more transparent. This was coupled with the expected benefits of consolidating all data on a single location and a single system – in terms of reporting accuracy and speed. Management of user authorizations and security eased (contrasted with access rights assignment in multiple systems earlier) as well as streamlined backup and recovery capabilities.

The Learning Management System (LMS) based on Moodle centralizes content (across campuses) as well as engages the faculty and students into a more collaborative way of studying-both in terms of student-teacher interaction as well as peer interaction. The faculty can include Blogs and Wikis on their pages, thus effectively making this a primary source of contact with students. This also includes popular modes of communication such as chat and discussion forums. The faculty can provide assignments to students; and create online quizzes that are evaluated instantly; and individually grade them.

The mail system is supported by a SpamAssassin based anti-spam filtering system and Kaspersky anti-virus. It has a web client and also supports mobile client access. All of the University's officials access their e-mail from their smartphones. An LDAP standards based global address book has also been deployed to provide online address lookups across all locations. An Instant Messaging (IM) system that uses this address book for users has been deployed across locations to reduce traditional channel communication costs.

The University has implemented a student portal that gives a student access to his records during the semester. Currently available records are for examination results (where it is possible to generate a facsimile of the grade card), fee paid/due, online attendance (including color coded status of attendance per subject as well as overall), placement information (including eligibility, details on companies coming to campus, and a historical record of the number of times a student has appeared for a placement interview). The University library is fully automated using Libsys 4.0 with the WebOpac component for web-based catalog searches. This is also integrated into the student portal enabling students to search through the library catalogue online.

Dr Ashish Bharadwaj Associate Director - IT

Being a young University, the most important challenges are to implement initiatives that help in scalable and sustainable academic development, establishing well defined processes for all stakeholders, and resource optimization.

The University was the first in Uttarakhand to implement Wi-Fi across campus. This standard has been maintained across all its campuses. Multiple 802.11g devices-both indoor and outdoor from a mix of vendors are being used with seamless client roaming, client load balancing and AES based security.

The University has also adopted server virtualization to rationalize space and contribute to a greener environment in terms of reduced power and cooling requirements; and improving the utilization of servers that were often utilized only during peak workloads. Dynamic allocation of resources made it possible to create up to 6 virtual servers on each physical server thereby reducing the number of physical servers to 20% of their original number.

For each campus there's an L3 based LAN with fibre connectivity amongst buildings. The network is divided into zones that cater to different sections of the campus – eg. students, labs, finance, examinations etc. VLANs have been created for all of these entities to ensure logical separation and separate access control. Inter-campus connectivity is provided through a 1MBps MPLS VPN that has class of service policies defined for different traffic types. All devices on the network are manageable and are monitored 24x7 through network management tools.