Project Lighthouses
Project Lighthouses uses IMail Server to help children connect with each other
For children who are confined to a hospital due to illness, the world often feels like a lonely place. Playtime is substituted with time spent with doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. It is a difficult way to spend part of your childhood.
In the Czech Republic, thousands of sick and disabled children are finding an outlet during their illness with help from Project Lighthouses. Project Lighthouses (also know as majaky.cz) is a cooperative initiative between Czech Telecom and thirteen hospitals to provide these children with a way to connect with friends all around the world through the use of the Internet. Majaky, which is Czech for lighthouse, is a Web site that offers activities for children in an entertaining yet educational way. The Web site offers a variety of activities, games, and communications tools to children. With a nautical theme, the Web site invites the users (“sailors”) to learn to write magazine articles for other sailors to read, talk to other children in chat rooms, send birthday greetings to friends, read fairy tales, and much more. “We have an average of 8,000 children a year in our hospitals who are terminally ill or have long-term illnesses,” said Jiri Sulovsky. “Majaky.com provides a forum for these children to share their thoughts and feelings about their illnesses and disabilities.”
Since the Majaky project also involves children too young to read much of the Web site uses multimedia content. Stickers were also created for the keyboards to assist younger children in working on the computer. “Because this project has been so successful, we later decided to open the Web site to all children in order to help destroy the barriers between ill and healthy children,” added Sulovsky. “We currently have 39,500 children who visit the Web site and use it to send e-mail.”
For the e-mail portion of this exciting project, Majaky is using IMail Server from Ipswitch. IMail Server is a comprehensive e-mail server that is quick to install and easy to administer. IMail Server has more than just the standard features you would expect. With its Web messaging capabilities, users can access their e-mail from anywhere with a Web browser. Many e-mail servers require you to pay every time you add new users. With IMail Server’s variable licensing options, you only pay for the number of users you need, but still have room to grow.
“This aspect of IMail Server was particularly important to Project Lighthouses as our young population of e-mail users is always changing, so we needed a mail server that provided us with this type of flexibility” said Sulovsky. “We are very happy with IMail.” In the future, Project Lighthouses hopes add more educational activities to the site and add more Web pages as children continue to contribute information to the site. Project Lighthouses also plans to expand the program to include 10 more hospitals in the Czech Republic so that even more children can find friendship, hope, and understanding by sharing ideas on a Web site.