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 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 - DfEE policy is forcing everyone to move to EDI for school admin - 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 plenty of other people in the education market (Viglen, RM (?) and others) would like an alternative. Perhaps one of them can back the development. and my choice would be MySQL/Postgresql backend and PHP/perl for the interface. Malcolm On Sunday 29 April 2001 17:55, Phil Driscoll wrote:
However, I wouldn't exclude the possibility of writing special clients if functionality required it (and I'd write them in Tcl/Tk, for portability).
I would argue strongly that special clients should not be required or provided. Once you provide them, then there is a temptation to implement functionality in them that is not available in the web clients, and I believe that in this day and age there is very little that cannot be done with cleverly designed web pages and server side software.
That said, I think this implementing such a system is an excellent idea.
Does anyone on the list have a handle on the value for the average cost per school x total number of UK schools for current systems?
Cheers -- Phil Driscoll Dial Solutions +44 (0)113 294 5112 http://www.dialsolutions.com http://www.dtonline.org
-- ------------------------------------ Malcolm Herbert Red Hat Europe t:+44 1483 734955 m:+44 7720 079845 ------------------------------------