Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (46 mails)

["Grainge, Derek" <DGG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> When the idea of the tests was mooted several years back it was to be
an
> 'online' test delivered through a browser and therefore accessible to
> all. Why is it now 'onscreen' and proprietary?
> Here's my tuppence worth - RM want to make money, as much as possible.
> The overheads of a web application (for them) are large (servers,
> administration etc.). So someone at RM had the idea of hi-jacking a
> school's computing facilities (and admin. etc) to save them a packet,
> and as usual it's the schools themselves that suffer, and what's
worse,
> our pupils.
> Why are they allowed to rob us like this? 

When Capita redesigned SIMS (and their other products) as SIMS.NET, they
promised faithfully there would be a web front end - I remember a
meeting with their then boss who said just that.  What they have
delivered they have very insultingly called 'thin client' - it's nothing
of the sort.  It is a very fat suite of client tools interacting with an
MS SQL Server database.  They derive the term 'thin' from the ways that
have tried to minimise network traffic :-)

They claimed originally that workstation upgrade requirements were
minimal, then revealed a min spec of 256 Mb memory, and (if I remember)
a 300Mb processor, but my experience is that you need 512 K memory, and
about 1.5 Gb processor to get reasonable speed, and a higher spec if you
want to use other applications at the same time while eliminating
slow-downs.  Upgrades to stations have cost a packet. At least we went
into this with our eyes open.

One beneficial side effect is that Office application and Suites like
Corel work dramatically faster - but it's always easier to demonstrate
administrative need to money men :-)

Only now (3 years down the road from release) are they delivering web
parts which will allow some web-based data interrogation. It's unclear
whether these will work on anything but IE.

I have heard one cynical thought on a group a while back:   that
Microsoft hold shares in Capita, and this is one reason why they have
adopted the .NET executable approach to development.   Can anyone
confirm that?

Derek Grainge
Webmaster and systems integrator

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