1. What is iBranch? How is it different from the Website of our college?
"
iBranch" stands for
Internet Branch. The iBranch of a college becomes the
“Official Intra College Portal” for students, teachers, T&P cell and management to share day-to-day information through Internet. The purpose of your
"Website" is to introduce your college to the outside world. Its like a detailed brochure which contains mostly static information like
'Courses Offered', 'Departments', 'Faculty Members', 'Facilities & Infrastructure', 'Achievements' etc.
Whereas the purpose of iBranch is to share day-to-day information like notices, announcements, classnotes or queries which is highly dynamic in nature (changing every day or hour). Also iBranch is strictly for the members of your organization, not for outsiders.
Technically, the intra college portal is much more complex than that of a website. That’s because, an intra-college portal is a collection of many ‘web applications’ which allow people to collaborate in different ways.
For example, see our
Demo Intra College Portal
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2. Why Does my college need an iBranch?
If you want to take the advantage of Internet technology in day-to-day functioning your college, you need an iBranch. Since interactivity and knowledge-sharing is the most important day-to-day activity in a college, iBranch (intra-college portal) is equally important as classrooms & black-boards, especially in this Internet age. It also helps the college management to organize the functioning of staff and activities of students more easily.
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3. Why use Internet when all our teachers & students have mobile phones?
Sending information over mobile phones through SMS is suitable only for short notices and quick alerts. When compared to online announcement, SMS based notices will be quite expensive because an average notice in a college would require atleast 3-4 SMSes per student to display fully. Hence SMS can only be used as an extension/add-on of online notice board, and not as a substitute.
And apart from announcements, there are many other ways in which you share information within your college. For example, in a department, HoD will need to share a common calendar so that every faculty-member is aware about the schedule and responsibilities of other faculty-members
(hence you need an online calendar). HoD, teachers and students will need to hold group-discussions which should be available for reference in future
(hence you need forums). They would also need to share a lot of documents among them
(hence you need online document repositories).
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4. Why do we need more ways of collaborating when we use e-mail?
E-mail is most suitable for personal communication. Although you can send detailed messages with attached documents to a number of recipients at once, it is still unorganized. E-mailing a message to a group of people is like distributing photocopies of that message instead of putting it on a notice board (What if the message needs a small correction after it has been distributed??). iBranch provides you with a sophisticated notice board on the Internet (along with lots of other features of course).
Wikipedia states "loss of context" and “inconsistency” as drawbacks of e-mail, it says “Email can duplicate information. This may be a problem, when a team is collaboratively working on documents”. For the recipients too, it is difficult to categorize the mails because everything is at one place. (Yes we know you can tag or label your mails, but how can you enforce all members to create the same kind of tags and ensure that they DO tag their mails every time?)
E-mail was one of the first applications over Internet (more than 2 decades old!). Lately we have seen many new collaborative applications emerge, like instant messaging, discussion forums, blogs and others using which users share information and content over Internet. Emergence and popularity of these applications prove that people need to collaborate in more than one ways.
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5. What direct benefits does college management get by using iBranch service?
iBranch enables the management of a college to
easily monitor the quality of the learning environment in the institute, and get direct feedback from students & teachers. It helps in cutting down your printing & photocopying costs and reducing your telephone bills, by centralizing the info-sharing.
It also helps to retain and develop the knowledge base of your college, which means even if a teacher leaves the organization, the knowledge shared by him/her over your iBranch shall remain for future reference.
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6. How can iBranch help my college become Environment Friendly?
iBranch helps in reducing the '
Carbon-Footprint' of each & every member of the college - students, teachers, administrators, and staff.
Every individual and every organization today has a big responsibility towards the environment. In a college a lot of Interaction, Info-sharing & Knowledge sharing happens everyday, which traditionally requires lot of paper and lot of transportation. If a college uses iBranch, the college administration and students both can cut down their printing & photocopying needs by more than 70%, thus saving a lot of paper! Through efficient usage of notice boards and discussion forums on iBranch, students and teachers can not only save time but also cut down on physical traveling, thus saving fuel and reducing Green House Gas emissions.
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7. If we keep our internal/private information on a web portal, then anybody can see it...
Your iBranch on www.iBranch.in is accessible ONLY to members you authorize. Unauthorized visitors only see a login screen when they visit your iBranch.
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8. Does iBranch have multi-level security? (Example, students should not see the notices given by management to teachers)
Yes, we provide ‘role based security’ for your portal.
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9. Why use iBranch when we can develop our own portal?
iBranch is the easiest and the most cost effective way of having Intra College Portal facility in your college. We also have a dedicated evangelizing team to help you make the best use of your Intra College Portal. Please see the page “
Advantage iBranch” for details.
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10. What hardware & software is needed to use iBranch service?
You only need a PC with Internet access and any of the web browsers.