On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:21:51AM +0100, Alan Davies wrote:
I'm not sure that 'free' is a good way to go here.
Administration is a mission critical area of school function. As such it can't possibly rely on goodwill of volunteers to find bugs and solve them - or to test new versions rigorously.
As opposed to relying on the goodwill of a commercial company, who's real interest is to make money and keep their shareholders happy. You could just as easily argue that it is too important and mission critical for control *not* to be in the public sector. Nothing stops LEA's, BECTa, etc or even commercial companies from supporting a school management system.
I am disappointed that the market is so dominated by a single supplier - SIMS (which we don't use - we use Phoenix).
In fact considering the high cost of SIMS I am surprised that there are not more competitors out there - but the reality is that users once familiar with SIMS (and having heared of SIMS) are not ready to migrate to anything else whether technically better, cheaper - or free.
This would make sense were it not for Capita continually fiddling with everything, including user interface. Much to the annoyance of the staff who actually have to use it. The reason we stick with SIMS is because of the LEA... -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763