Re: [LUG] Offer of venue for DCGLUG meeting related to Educationalsoftware

[Mark Evans <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Lancaster wrote:
> SIMS holds a variety of data relating to a schools students, staff, exam
> results and finances. Third party support is provided locally via ScoMIS
> or nationally from CAPITA.
>
> Its fairly unpopular among those of us that have to provide support as
> it uses a mixture of legacy DOS based modules and more modern Win32

With the DOS bits often being better written than the Win32 bits :)

SIMS was originally written by some ex-teachers whilst they might not 
have been the best programmers in the world they managed to do a 
reasonable job.

It's more recently that it "went commercial" and was bought by Capita.

> applications. During its development cycle no consistent policy on SQL
> implementations seems to have existed so different modules use different
> vendors for the database back-end. As a result several extra

Resulting in a strange mixture of file and client-server databases.

> applications have to be periodically run to shunt data from one module
> to another. You are required to install a client on all workstations and
> set several environmental variables before you can connect to the
> system.

Originally only one environment variable was required on the 
workstation. With it being perfectly possible to use workstations 
without any local HDD.

The amount of locally installed junk and the mimimum workstation 
specification has climbed enormously in the last few years. Yet 
functionality hasn't.

> Commonly requested features for a replacement Student Information
> Management System include...

I wonder who is requesting these.

> * LEA level Super-scoping, so users can be easily moved between schools
> without having to manually update their records.
>
> * Active Directory/LDAP integration.
>
> * Web based option to avoid client installs.
>
> * Single vendor solution for the db back-end, be it MSDE with the option
> of upgrading to SQL2000 or MySQL/Postgres etc.
>
> I also support CMIS, which provides similar functionality to SIMS but
> provides a web based front-end and uses SQL2000 for the db. SIMS .net is
> in the process of being rolled out at the moment, which aims to fix some
> of the long standing issues with SIMS.

Except that it dosn't...

> Many schools will not have the option to move away from SIMS as they
> will be tied into support contracts with ScoMIS. SIMS also provides some
> specific functionality for uploading and downloading information to
> local gov.

Actually this was written by DITS/Scomis, sort of "integrating" into the 
 FMS6 database. With someone making the daft design decision that the 
transaction log must be stored on the local HDD of a specific machine.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature