Supporting the unique needs of the education community in Oman

Oman closed down universities and colleges in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the faculty members faced issues converting to online education without notice.

One of the issues at the time was how to prepare and mark examinations online. Many of the faculty members had concerns about sharing examination details via email, not only for security and privacy reasons, but also the size of the data. Then, the Higher College of Technology, Muscat asked for a unified solution for the community.

The Omani Research and Education Network (OMREN) of the Research Council (TRC), stepped in. This situation presented an opportunity to assist its 50 members by developing and launching the Mirsal file sender service, hosted locally to meet the higher education and research communities’ requirements for sharing learning materials and large data sets.

Mirsal is a premium file sender service for the Research and Education community in Oman.It is a web-based application that allows authenticated users to send large files safely and easily to other users.  The service was developed by OMREN employees with the support of other international research and education networks.

The service has a variety of different features to meet the needs of researchers, including the 20-day transmission validity period, the 30-file maximum number of files per transmission, and the 50-recipient maximum, equal to the number of OMREN members. All file formats are acceptable except .exe and .bat. and the maximum file size for each transfer of HTML5 browsers is 50Gbps.

OMREN is core sustainable infrastructure, which helps to build an effective national innovation ecosystem. OMREN provides the research and education communities of the Sultanate of Oman with a common network and collaboration infrastructure that suits their needs.