(Borneo Post; November 7, 2006)

KUCHING: Civil servants can now hold conferences in the comfort of their offices through video conferencing. This has been made available on SarawakNet, the State government's intranet, with the launch of the Multimedia Conferencing System (MCS). State Secretary Datuk Amar Abdul Aziz Husain when launching the MSC here yesterday said they would benefit significantly from the enhanced communication channel and capabilities.

"We can save on traveling time, enable faster decision-making and lower our cost of operation such as in traveling and subsistence allowance," he said.

He hoped that the technology would increase frequency of discussions among government officers throughout the State, adding that pertinent documents could also be shared, swapped and viewed online by all participants at the same time.

MCS is brought to the State government's ICT arm, Sarawak Information Systems Sdn Bhd (Sains) which adopts the technology from Mlabs Systems Bhd.

MCS is a full-fledged multi-point video-conferencing system set to greatly improve the way meetings are held from the conventional coming together face-to-face discussion to conferencing face-to-face without actually having to be in the same room.

Aziz, who is Sains deputy chairman, said MCS ran on any network that supported Internet Protocol (IP), be it Local Area Network (LAN), a Wide Area Network (WAN) like the SarawakNet or the Internet.

"This allows many types of multimedia conferencing to take place at maximum effectiveness regardless of geographical constraints, be it desktop-to-desktop conference, boardroom-to-boardroom, and desktop-to-boardroom' he said.

He said MCS had a built-in security feature that the conference administrator could authenticate users and give permission for connection via this tool.

MCS could be implemented with minimal infrastructure cost as it operated on existing networks, and proved to be a band width ^friendly product even when the number of concurrent users increased, he added.

During the launch, Aziz held a video conferencing with Residents and Resident representatives in Miri, Bintulu, Sarikei, Samarahan and Sibu, and Permanent Secretary to the Urban Development and Tourism Ministry, Sarudu Hoklai.