Probably not at present unless it was tried and tested. At present the ICT team at county are testing the water to see how many schools are interested in moving to CMIS as it would affect their support and the funds they obtain for that role. Their overall timescale is around 3 years. If something came along which was better and more stable than both SIMS and CMIS I am sure they would look into it but there would have to be interest in schools around the county. Regards Bill

Would they be interested in other solutions?

Regards

Chris Puttick

-----Original Message----- From: Bill Antonia To: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Sent: 9/18/02 3:00 PM Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] School admin: Microsoft only?

East Sussex are looking into CMIS, mainly driven by a group of interested schools who wish to move away from SIMS.

Regards Bill

...

I've been having all sorts of trouble with the attitude of people at our LEA.

First was that for PLASC returns they have decided to use RM Securenet which requires MSIE and associated junk. They got upset when I told them "sorry, we don't support that software".

Then we have the situation of the latest replacement for the SIMS STAR module "superSTAR". For which Capita have decided to base around Microsoft .NET. (Assuming they don't change their mind yet again.) They recommend workstations with Windows XP, P4/AMD Athlon XP, 1/2G memory, 10G free hard disk, 17" monitor. To meet the kind of specs which the LEA are giving to us would mean spending up to 20 thousand pounds for little, if any, improvement.

My overall feeling is that various people have completly lost the plot and really don't understand that the priorities for schools are other than having the latest and greatest toys to play with.

Let alone that this spec is completly overblown for a machine to lookup data on database. Sometimes also to do some wordprocessing, email and web browsing.

The only way of using something else would be if we could also persuade the majority of secondary schools in Devon to drop SIMS.

What are other peoples' experiences?

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

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