(Eastern Times; November 3, 2006)

KUCHING: SARAWAK will be among one of the pioneer states when it rolls out its very own Multimedia Conferencing System (MCS) on the SarawakNet that will revolutionise the way conferences and meetings to be held by government departments and local authorities.

The system is also expected to significantly help reduce traveling cost besides obtaining immediate results where speedy decision malting is required. State Secretary Datuk Amar Haji Abdul Aziz Haji Husain revealed during a dinner held last night in conjunction with the two-day local councils' meeting that the State had been trying the MCS internally among some ministries and Resident's Offices.

"The MSC pilot system has been tested in my office, the State Financial Secretary office and the State Attorney General Office and generally, I am pleased with the result," he said.

He said that the next plan would be to see the full rollout of the system at all the State Public Service offices and Government Link Companies (GLC) and with some practice, it would be expected to be widely used like the E-mail, leave applications and many other e-government applications.

With the implementation of the MCS, the state is embarking on the next stage of multimedia conferencing application, deployment and registration of users from the various State departments and ministries.

"For organisations that have multiple offices spread throughout the State, this system is an ideal tool for face-to-face communications without the need to travel, hence saving traveling time apart from enabling faster decision-making," said Aziz.

Operation costs could also be low-ered, and recent global as well as local events that resulted in higher cost of air travel within the State would make the use of this technology a necessity, he pointed out.

The State Secretary gave a sneak preview of the system, which will be launched on Monday, to those who were present at the dinner, which was also a Hari Raya Aidifitri Ramah Tamah function. He said that MCS was more than the normal video conferencing because vir-tual discussion, important documents could also be shared and viewed online by ail participants at the same time.

MCS, in essence, combines audio, 'video, document, images and mes-saging within a secured networked of environment.

MCS, according to Aziz, runs on any network that support Internet Protocol (IP), be it local area network (LAN) or a wide area network like the SarawakNet, which allows many types of multimedia conferencing to take place.

"The multimedia conferencing has, therefore, evolved from a mere point to point offering to multipoint conferencing. This enables multipoint to multi point conferencing to be carried out with maximum effectiveness regardless of geographical constraints," he said.

With MCS, not only can you hear, see and talk, you can also swap or transfer files, presentation slides, reports or watch videos while conferencing, and this enhance feature is essentials and very practical in today's meeting in which immediate result or decision making is heeded.

He further explained that MCS had a built-in security feature whereby the conference administrator could authenticate users and give permission for connection via this tool, hence answering the question whether MCS was secure or not since it allowed data, voice & and images to be transferred across the shared IP network.

Because MCS runs on existing networks, it gives zero additional infrastructure cost. MCS also requires only one conference server to manage all the conferencing needs as oppose to the conventional expensive multipoint control unit (MCU).

"This has brought down the invest-ment cost immensely and at the same time, increases the effectiveness tremendously, using the multicasting transmission technology. MCS proves to be a bandwidth-friendly product even when the number of concurrent users increases," he said.

Deputy State Secretaries, Datuk Wilson Baya Dandot and Datuk Morshidi Ghani and State Attorney-General, Datuk J.C Fong were among those who were present at the dinner