Hi
Regarding killer school apps, what are the following
SIMS and scomis,
SIMS is a schools management package produces by Capita Education Systems. http://www.capitaes.co.uk They want to move everything over to MS SQL server and .net. ScoMIS is Devon (plus Torbay and Plymouth) County Council educational "support". http://www.devon.sch.uk/eal/scomis (N.B. this has a tendency to crash Netscape 4; the links don't work in Lynx; Netscape 6/7, Galeon & Konqueror appear to manage reasonably well.)
I know that ALICE is a library management application, I am not sure about
Alice is produced by Softlink, http://www.softlink.co.uk, their head office is http://www.softlink.com.au
the other two, it seems that if we had open source versions of the above, then we could really move forward in terms of getting open source into schools. However not being sure of what these are or what they do makes looking for or helping to develop alternatives difficult..
Chris Puttick has a system called "Hobart" running, in Manchester. He's also looking into SQL ledger (http://www.sql-ledger.org) as a replacement for the SIMS FMS6 module. There is an open source library system called Koha, http://www.koha.org. Obvious difficulties include the ability to extract catalogue and borrower data from existing systems. One feature which would definitly qualify as a "killer app" would be the ability to look up details directly from an ISBN/ISSN. In either the 10 digit or the 13 digit EAN format. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763