Welcome to the European Education Connectivity Solution (EECS)

The first Periodic Review of the EECS Project recently took place at Waterford Institute of Technology on July 15^th 2010. Those in attendance were the EECS coordinator OneCard Solutions, Ireland and the two SME participants OPTeam, Poland and Mecenat, Sweden. A member of the Executive Management Committee was also in attendance along with the EECS Project Officer and an external reviewer.

Recently some members of the EECS consortium have attended and presented at international card conferences. Members of the CTRC in Waterford Ireland and OneCard Solutions Waterford have presented at these conferences outlining the updates and progress made by the EECS Project. In April 2010, the CTRC presented at the annual NACCU conference in Phoenix in the USA and in June 2010, a presentation was also given at ECCA’s annual conference in Ireland.

Our next meeting of the EECS RTDs is to take place on February 1^st in Dublin, Ireland. The main goal of this meeting is to allow the RTDs to make an updated presentation on the final technical specification document. The presentations will be based on areas such as the Card Application Management System, the Card Application Interface and the Student Connectivity Solution.

Work is now well underway for Work Package 3 - Technical Requirements Analysis and Scientific Solutions. A requirement of this work package is to develop the EECS Technical Specifications. Currently a draft EECS four core technical specification is being developed among the three RTDs of the Project.

To enable the successful outcome of Work Package 3, a Technical Workshop took place on the 15th and 16th of October at the Radisson Hotel in London. This technical workshop was arranged in order for the RTDs involved in the project to present their technical specifications for the EECS prototype to the SMEs involved in the project. The membership of this workshop was drawn from industrial experts, academics and ECCA.

The EECS held a Standards Expert Workshop at the Radisson Hotel London Stansted on August 21st and 22nd 2009 in accordance with work package 2 requirements. The workshop was a huge success bringing together industry experts, academics and ECCA. The aim of this workshop was to advise on establishing a set of standards for the campus card industry.

As part of the project and work package two, a Standards Expert Workshop will take place on the 21st and 22nd of August at the Radisson Hotel in London.  This expert workshop was arranged to advise the consortium of the conclusion of the research stage of the project prior to establishing standards.

The FP7 funded European Education Connectivity Solution (EECS) Project has already garnered immense interest internationally. Two major campus card and ID technology publications in the USA have written articles on the EECS Project in recent weeks. On June 11th CR80 news, a US publication on campus cards, published an article on the EECS Project detailing the funding source and information on the project itself. To read the full article, please Click Here.

The European Education Connectivity Solution (EECS) Project was officially launched at the annual conference of the European Campus Card Association held at the Radisson Hotel London Stansted on June 8th 2009.

All consortium partners met and held a kick off meeting to plan out the next few months work for work package 2 & 3. The EECS website was also launched.

The EECS Project has received final approval from the EU under the FP7-SME-2008-1 call. The project will now commence on June 1st 2009. Currently all consortium members are actively involved in the preplanning stage for the start of the project.