To offer over 10 million students Google applications for e-mail, calendar and instant messaging CAIRO: Google has announced that it is providing Egypt's Ministry of Higher Education the ability to offer three million university students and the Ministry of Education s eight million preparatory students, Google applications for email, instant-messaging, and calendar. As part of Google Apps for Education, Google's set of hosted communications services, Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk have been available free of charge to all 11 million students across the region since Dec. 3 2006. The system brings many benefits to students in Egypt, including two gigabytes of email storage per student, powerful search capabilities to help locate important messages, enhanced spam filtering, and calendars that can be easily shared with friends and across groups. Both Egyptian Ministries are the first organizations to implement Google Apps for Education in the region. "We are delighted to be able to offer our students access to Google's unique suite of communication tools, says Hany Helal, Minister of Higher Education. "We believe that strategic alliances with technology leaders like Google are key to accelerating the contribution that technology can make to the education in Egypt. We are very excited about this collaboration with Google says Yousry El-Gamal, Minister of Education, and it will encourage all preparatory school students to use the internet as well as give them a sense of belonging to an online student community. On a rare visit to Cairo, Eric Schmidt, chairman of the executive committee and chief executive officer, Google said As a company, it has been our mission to provide greater access to the world's information, including personal information. We are delighted that our communication and collaboration tools will enable millions of students in Egypt to keep track of class and activity schedules and stay in close touch with their classmates and teachers. By using Google Apps for Education, Ministries of Education and Higher Education can focus on more pressing technology projects that benefit the school and students. Beginning December students logging into the current student email system will be presented with the option to begin using the new services from Google immediately. The service does not require installation or maintaining of any additional hardware or software.
