The College’s IT department is fully trained on how to upload content and manage the website using our Open Source easy-to-use content management platform. We look forward to seeing this site grow.

• Foreign currency exchange rate data: automatically updated daily from the Bank of Botswana,
• Stock trading data: automatically uploaded daily from information provided by the Botswana Stock Exchange, and
• Digital certificate to provide a secure connection to browsers and to assure their clients that the website is authentic.

Stock trading data is presented as a ticker tape and as tables listing the top 5 gainers and losers. In addition to reducing workload for the webmaster, this automation helps eliminate errors commonly perpetrated when data is transcribed manually on a regular basis. You can view the website by clicking here.

Botswana’s Centre for Human Rights

Ditshwanelo’s website which Cyberplex Africa recently developed contains information on the organization’s work in Botswana, the variety of which surprises many given the country’s reputation as a well governed, democratic, prosperous and peaceful nation in a historically troubled region of Africa. Take a look at it for yourself.

This stunning development shines the spotlight on the gains being increasingly made by so-called FOSS (free and open source software) solutions which “grant the user the right to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code“. MySQL is a key part of the LAMP stack consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python, and was originally developed in Sweden by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael “Monty” Widenius who had been working together since the 1980s.

This acquisition enables Sun to provide the most complete open source solution for building and deploying efficient, effective, and secure Web-based applications and services. Over the last decade, the company has morphed from providing proprietary software to open source. It already provides Java, OpenSolaris, and OpenOffice under open source licensing. Both companies now give away most of their software, and instead generate revenues by offering services for the free software and providing deluxe versions of the software to large corporations.

The acquisition of the world’s second largest independent software company, which holds more than 49% of the open source database market, will cause some consternation on the part of some in the open source camp, but others expect it to further validate the open source business model.

More information is available here and here and here.

 By comparison, the top 5 African countries (in terms of population online) are Nigeria (8m), Morocco (6.1m), Egypt (6m), South Africa (5.1m), and Sudan (3.1m). In terms of % penetration, the order is Seychelles (35.4%), Reunion (27.4%), Mauritius (24%), Morocco (18.1%), Tunisia (15.7%). The population list is notable for emphasizing countries with the bigger populations, while the penetration rate throws the spotlight primarily on island nations.

Returning to Botswana, in contrast to the low Internet usage and penetration rate (using the ITU’s data from 2004), the mobile penetration rate, at 28% is well above the African average of 6.1%. And at 493,000 the total number of mobile phone users dwarfs Internet users. The highest mobile phone penetration rates are led by small island nations — Reunion (74.7%) and Seychelles (68.4%), followed by South Africa (36.4%), Botswana (28%), and Morocco (24.3%). Botswana is unique in displaying low Internet access combined with high cellphone penetration.

The government of Botswana has recognized this gap, and while it is continuing with policy reforms aimed at further liberalizing the telecommunications sector, it has also started efforts to address Internet access. One recent initiative, dubbed iPartnership, is a public-private partnership led by the government’s Ministry of Communictions, Science and Technology in collaboration with Microsoft, and includes other public sector participants and local private sector players. The initiative is modeled loosely after Microsoft’s Partnerships for Technology Access.

The program recognizes that Internet adoption depends on many factors other than level of physical internet access. iPartnership therefore aims at providing more affordable access to computers, acessories, training, and internet access. The main target beneficiaries are civil servants, IT graduates, and unemployed youth. The program’s stated goal is to increase computer penetration at home through offering attractive credit guarantee plans for the target audiences. It is hoped that this will help create employment, particularly for the youth, as well as helping the country become a significant player in the global economy.

The program’s details are available here. Also, many of the key elements and drivers of the government’s ICT strategy are documented here.

For sure, few of the world’s 1.5 billion Internet users know what Netscape Communications Corporation became famous for in 1995, let alone who acquired it in 1999. But those in the know will be clear about the role of Geneva-based European nuclear research agency CERN through the work of one Tim Bernard Lee, on to a Silicon Valley startup company named Mosaic Communications Corporation through the work of (then obscure University of Illinois undergraduate student) Marc Andreesen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Then named Mosaic, Andreesen’s Internet browser became one of the most downloaded Internet applications ever and led to growing popular interest in the Internet and the company. By the end of 1994, Mosaic Corporation had been renamed Netscape Communications Corporation, and it continued to soar in the public imagination. This all culminated in the then biggest initial public stock offering and fuelled the subsequent dot-com boom.

Unfortunately, following intense competition, principally from Microsoft, the popularity of Netscape’s browser and its related servers almost immediately started a steady decline which brought about the company’s 1999 acquisition by America Online. AOL went on to acquire media giant Time Warner for US$164 billion in 2000, creating AOL Time Warner. In 2003, as the profitability of the AOL division declined, AOL Time-Warner, dropped the AOL moniker and reverted to just Time Warner, signalling that investors no longer believed that an association with Internet properties provided meaningful value to the original media company.

In addition to activities carried out fully or partly in Botswana, the law is also applicable to Botswana nationals outside the country, and to infringements committed outside of Botswana if they have an effect in the country.

Among other areas, the law addresses unauthorized access to computers and the consequences of such access, unlawful interception of data, unlawful disclosures by service providers, and defines direct cybercrimes in the area of extortion, fraud, and trafficking in obscene material. And it creates special protections for computer devices and networks that are used as part of the national infrastructure security, defense, banking, public utilities  and financial and communication networks. It defines a variety of sanctions including jail term and fines whose magnitudes depend on the severity of the infraction.

The law empowers the national Police service to issue preservation and production orders, and engage in access, search and seizure operations (upon the approval of the relevant judicial official). While this is only part of the legislation required for Botswana to fully embrace the global information society — the other high priority area is electronic records, evidence, and digital signatures which is critical to enabling consumer and commercial electronic transactions more fully – it is a good start. Clearly, the next challenge will be to ensure adequate capacity buildup in the country’s law enforcement.

Unfortunately, Botswana’s laws are not publicly available online. The Attorney-General’s Chambers’ Website is available here. For further related information visit this link.

Consider, for example, how a new employee gets inducted into the organization. How and where does he/she find important information such as what the company holidays are, leave policies, the latest training manuals, etc.

How about learning the organization’s language - including common acronyms, definitions and tips? In larger organizations, such as government ministries and departments, even locating a colleague’s phone or extension number traditionally involves calling other colleagues and thumbing well-worn incomplete sheets of paper thumb-tacked to the wall. No wonder, according to Accenture Ltd., that 59% of managers in large US and UK companies reported that they regularly miss information that might be valuable to their jobs because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it.

But, designing and building an intranet is only one aspect of what’s needed to ensure success. To ensure that the intranet is truly providing value to the organization, it must convert employees into dedicated repeat users. This in turn requires a steady diet of good, useful information and resources, backed by a clear demonstration of commitment at the highest management level. The catch is that useful information comes from everywhere in the organization. Given competing demands in any organization, without the active support of top management, it is very unlikely that efforts to develop intranet resources would be successful.

Success therefore requires a clear strategy that recognizes the cross-functional value of intranet resources, and which allocates clear ownership and responsibilities for the different aspects of intranet operations. The bottom line is that without addressing the the people and process issues, investments in software and hardware alone will not guarantee the returns sought.

As part of our intranet solution Cyberplex Africa offers two industry leading platforms — Microsoft SharePoint and The Adweb Agency’s Intranet Dashboard and then we combine them with best practice strategy development and implementation thus ensuring that your staff and organization clearly benefit from the investment. *click here* to let us help you with your intranet project.

The principle is the same — why spend on cars, buses, plane flights, fuel, hotels, lunches and the like when the same meeting can be accomplished using the Web — for which you’re already paying a fixed price? Traditionally, the way to avoid this was to invest in expensive dedicated video-conferencing facilities and high speed dedicated telecom links, which look good in the boardroom but get used only occasionally. However, if your finances constrain you from adopting this solution, alternatives are meagre.

But now, the combination of broadband Internet, Skype, and Yugma brings practical online conferencing and collaboration to — well — practically everyone. If you are not already familiar with Skype, contact us and we will show you how you can virtually eliminate your phone bill by using this amazing voice application. Yugma is an even more impressive online collaboration application that allows you to connect to other people online and then show them your computer’s desktop — even letting them click on and manipulate objects such as documents on your computer’s screen. With Skype providing the audio connection, the result is that you and your remote colleagues can participate in corporate training sessions, review and edit documents together simultaneously, and do many of the sort of things they would normally hop onto a plane or a car for.

There are necessarily some pre-requisites for this solution to work well. Top on the list is that you must have access to sufficient Internet bandwidth. Going by our observations around southern Africa, this is not always guaranteed — either because the “broadband” links really aren’t broad (blame the telcos and ISPs), because they are expensive, because organizations do not manage their Internet resources well, and because many are skimping on this potentially very effective resource.

Yugma and Skype eliminate the cost of the platform as an excuse. Both are free and provide impressive free services, backed up by even more impressive premium services. The free version of Yugma, for example, allows you to connect up to 10 people using an Internet browser, with whom you can share your desktop including viewing and annotating the same copy of a document. Seamless integration with Skype means that you can establish a two-way teleconference with your audience. The premium version adds larger audiences (even 500 people), lets you select presenters from any of your remote users, and allows you to record a session (say as a training tool). Sessions can be scheduled in advance. And because Yugma runs on Java (supporting Windows, Macs, and Linux), you do not need to install any special software package. We have used this tool to collaborate effectively with clients and partners as far away as the US and Europe. We shudder to think what that kind of travel would have done to our bottom line, or alternately to our ability to deliver the result. Long-distance collaboration has never been easier!

If you’d like us to show you how these tools can help your organization put the Internet to work and save your truly valuable resources, click here to let us know. And if you have used Yugma or other web collaboration solutions, we’d love to hear about your experience.