At Maidenhill School we have a very different system from many schools which combines systems from Unix, Linux, Windows, Apple and even Acorn. Our Unix server acts as system manager, web server, and mail server. We use Webmail by Precedence Technologies of Cambridge as a our mail reader and this meets the Becta spec. It also has a filtering system which dumps offensive e-mails in a box where they can be read and acted upon by teachers. The rest of our system is a mix of Windows PCs, Linux terminals, Unix PCs and even some Mac and old Acorn machines all running Citrix Metaframe centrally to deliver a mixture of software from the Microsoft and Open Source communities. It is available for 99% of the year, is accessible from home through a web browser and TCO is much lower than other systems. We can also run specialist software on local PC disks as required, eg. Cubase, Pinnacle, Quicktime without giving any access to the local machine to users. Like all systems it has a few problems but we are very pleased because it allows us to get on with educating. The technology cannot be tampered with and the interface is consistent. Whatever the local processor speed Metaframe runs at the central processor speed. If we had the knowhow and the time we would devlop the Open Source stuff further as it saves us a lot of money.

On Tue, Dec 23, 2003 at 01:47:58PM +0000, David Bowles wrote:

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As far as I can recall the way the spec is worded the reference to e-mail omits the term 'freeware' as an exclusion. Hence Outlook Express is a valid e-mail client.

The spec states "Email: Facility for offline email reading and composition. Freeware or shareware is not acceptable"

There isn't actually that much which meets such a spec.

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