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On the superhighways of the World Wide Web, information flows fluid and fast across colleges and educational institutes, bolstered by iBranch.in, which offers each a chance to start its own intra-institute portal for internal collaboration between students, faculty and administration.

Furnished with web applications such as announcements, discussion forums, blogs, document repositories and event calendars, iBranch facilitates the day-to-day activities at educational institutions — the sharing of information, documents, notifications and feedback as well as group interaction — without the need to purchase additional hardware or software.

Though commercial solutions for intra-organisation collaborative portals are available elsewhere, these are prohibitively priced for educational institutions and are aimed at corporate firms. Also, such open-source solutions involve a steep learning curve and high total cost of ownership. Meanwhile, iBranch is directed at the domain of higher education, with the layout and features of its portals designed specially for colleges.

Founded by Raghu Pandey in October 2005, iBranch currently reaches out to around 20,000 students across more than 50 colleges of India. “I was driven by an urge to create something that I believe is useful and required, and not by a need to be my own boss,” he says. Initially making certain mistakes, such as employing people part-time for lesser salaries, iBranch has gone on own to forge a path of success.

Over the past year, iBranch has been ranked number one by Google, Yahoo! and Bing in the category of ‘best intra-college portal’. And for some its clients, iBranch has become critical to their activities. In fact, in August 2008, a management college in Bhopal adopted its services in a large way, scrapping its physical notice board and stopping the distribution of photocopies to students and sending memoranda to its staff physically. “The college went completely online through our services,” Pandey says.

Once, when the iBranch service was down for an entire day, this entrepreneur received a “real testimonial” from the director of the institute, who said, “Raghu, I don’t know all this technical stuff. But I want it resolved by 10 am tomorrow…our notices and lecture plans are stuck with you.” For Pandey, this was milestone.