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On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Dave Foxcroft wrote: > All schools are being required to provide kids & parents access to > records such as achievement and attendance as part of the Gov' education > 'strategy' so the county may have provided a means to do this via some > online app (I know CCC is touting Merlin for it's primary schools - not > sure if this will allow access to records etc) - the 'server not > available' may well be where this app is going to be accessed. So is it worthwhile someone/us writing a bespoke system that actually does what they need (for school records) and hosts it externally, so with the righ auth. teachers, etc. can update it and parents, etc. can read it? Then do it all open source, no need need to tell them that of-course, just provide a standards compliant web interface, and sell/rent/lease it to the schools at a sustainable price and off you go... > The biggest problem with primaries is that most of them pay the county > for support and if the county is committed to the M$ way than trying to > get anything else in there is a real headache as it will probably not be > supported. > > Having spoken to a couple of primary schools on the subject - moodle is > seen as overkill (remember the network is normally managed by the main > teacher of ICT - they are paid to teach not run networks!) I've no idea what merlin/moodle are though, but if someone were to come up with what's actually needed.... (ie, a product spec...) > Karoshi - well I know one of the schools that is using it - they have > WinXP PC's - all the same local logon, windows workgroup - no domain > with no need for a DC so they are only using it as a file server which > is a real shame as Karoshi does pretty much everything you would need on > a primary school network. Intersting. I've built up a few simple server control panels over the years which I guess this is. But there's always webmin, etc. if you want to build the underlying Linux server yourself... ... and that's been most of the battle I've encountered. It's all well and good putting a CD in the drive and off you go, but where does that leave you regarding drive redunancy, failures, backups and so on... It wouldn't be hard to put together a nice system that has mirrored drives, does all the usual stuff required (dns,dhcp, samba, printing, etc.) give it a nice control panel, arrange automatic off-site backup and off you go... Apart from the politics of it all ;-) One of my clients locally (independant charity school) uses edubuntu (I think) and diskless 'thin clients' in their admin department, but they also have to support MS & Sage for their accounting... They don't like ICT, so have the barest minimum there, but it's totally separate from the admin network, etc. (probably just as well) Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html