Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (72 mails)

["Mark Evans" <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> hi
> 
> interesting thread developing here, i've a meeting tommorrow to discuss an 
> 'open source' SIMS alternative, including discussions on reverse engineering 
> some of it. An early estimate from the developer is that about £50,000 of 

Which bits of it...

> their time could provide a working basis for a project. Like many small 
> companies, they'd need the money up front, too risky to create a product in 
> the hope of uptake. 
> 
> Some facts:-
> - Capita state that SIMS has 90% of the schools market for admin software, 
> and who says Micro$oft were anti-comptetive

IIRC MS have recently put quite a bit of money into Capita. Probably
explains the reason why they want to move things to Microsoft SQL.

(Interestingly I now have a Windows 2000 server which can't be seen by
Windows 95 on the network, but smbclient can see fine...)

> - DfEE policy is forcing everyone to move to EDI for school admin

Dosn't help with
a) LEA people ignoring their own policy on document formats (and emailing
MS word documents with added virus.)
b) propirtary EDI systems which can only run on single machines.
c) EDI systems which are too complex for staff such as exams officers
to understand...

> - the other competitors in the market (state schools at least) include 
> Successmaker, about 3% of the market. 
> - none run on Linux, all locked in to Access/SQL server, although you can 
> view them as native DB's

Or more to the point locked to Windows...

> plenty of other people in the education market (Viglen, RM (?) and others) 
> would like an alternative. Perhaps one of them can back the development. 

Not to sure about RM, given my recent experience, through SWGfL...

-- 
Mark Evans
St. Peter's CofE High School
Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109
Fax: +44 1392 204763