Mark, Thanks for your reply. In answer to your comments:
-----Original Message----- From: Mark Evans [mailto:mpe@st-peters-high.devon.sch.uk] Sent: 15 January 2001 11:35 To: tim@fishercad.co.uk Cc: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] BETT comments
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Hi,
Intro (a bit of background): I am from a company in Staffordshire and we are a (friendly) Linux provider, developer we have installed Linux into Weston Road High School, Stafford. We have installed 1 fileserver, 1 Multimedia and 1 powerful Proxy Caching Server. Now that's out of the way......
Reason for post: I have spoken to a few people about SIMS and its current situation, it seems that nobody is happy with its installation, fragmented DOS/ Windows interface and its functionality. I have already had a few ideas for improvement from Weston Road and I was wondering if the lovely people on this mailing list could help answer the following questions.
1. Would it be a problem to run SIMS through a web browser. Why?
It had better be one which can do high grade SSL "out of the box", e.g. Konquerer or Opera, the latest version of Netscape, possibly Mozilla (IIRC) no idea about MSIE.
As a company we run a medium sized Internet server farm, Oooh yes security is an issue but I think our Security Engineers are pretty good so strong cryptography would be "out of the box".
2. Using MySQL as the database server.
Or Postgres...
Yes!
3. Using Linux as the OS. 4. How should it be priced (if any).
Certainly not more than SIMS costs at present :)
5. Can anyone help with the development (not necessarily programming). 6. Which government bodies would be involved.
This is a major issue, can't see SMC being happy without LEA support
How does this work at the moment?
7. Would there need to be a protocol for things like hand held devices, laptops to dump marking info, register info etc.
Allow the copying of timetables (which, of course, can include chunks of teacher and student databases) to a stand alone machine.
-- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
Regards Tim Woodcock. Technical Director. Fisher CAD Services Ltd.