Caution on the CMIS spiels - they've claimed DB agnosticism for years, but would only deliver it on Access/MS SQL/Oracle. I would be pleased to hear that they would support it on Postgre, as that would make it far more interesting to many schools. Sadly the web interface problems are not new and, given they were offered assistance in rectifying them FOC 2 years ago, it's a little odd to hear they are *still* working on them...

CMIS is Tomcat dependent, which has always confused me. Why use one open source project on 2k/IIS (and all the associated issues) when you could use the entire set (Linux/Apache/Tomcat) and deliver it as a sealed box?

-----Original Message----- From: Tony Whitmore [mailto:tonywhitmore@users.sourceforge.net] Sent: 18 January 2005 18:55 To: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Re: The BETT Show & A Computer on Tottenham Court Road

Grainge, Derek wrote:

<snip>

I think now Microsoft own part of the company. I doubt that this

would > have had anything to do with the decision to go .net executables though > ;)

This may sound silly, but are these *genuine* .Net programs? I suspect not. If they were, someone might stand a chance of running them under Mono.

On a related aside, I saw a presentation by Serco before Christmas of the CMIS (SIMS-like) software. Although closed-source itself, it can use

any SQL compliant backend - they have used Postgres and Oracle as well as MS SQL, for example. The web interface does not yet function entirely

in firefox, but they are working on that. Also, the client-side application (necessary for some more advanced features) is Windows-only,

but can be installed on each workstation or installed to a network share. I explained to them afterwards how this meant that they could provide an entirely Linux hosted system, through using Samba.

Tony