[Sussex] Getting Linux into schools

[Alex Harrington]

> The main objection being raised against the conversion is that old
> favourite: Windows-only applications. The school uses a 
> system called SIMS ("Student Information Management 
> services") which holds information about each pupil, their 
> timetable, and the electronic registers that teachers use at 
> the start of each class. It is (I speak from experience) a 
> fairly dreadful application, as it crashes a lot and has a 
> very arcane interface. But it's all they've got, and there's 
> not really any alternatives (on any platform) that they know of.

As a network manager in a school I think I can speak with a fair amount
of authority on SIMS .net.

SIMS was historically horrible. SIMS .net which was released 5 or so
years ago isn't that bad, is written to run on the .net 2 framework and
while isn't compatible with Mono yet - I'm sure it will be in the future
(it uses Winforms a lot). If it's crashing a lot, then it's generally
hardware or configuration that's causing it. It's not particularly badly
engineered. In addition, it's deeply coupled to MS Office. Capita claim
support for Open Office, but will often only fix problems when they
affect MS Office.

There are alternatives - like Serco Facility CMIS which have browser
based Uis which are more Linux friendly, but an MIS gets embedded deeply
in to the way a school works and is run - so switching isn't a trvial
operation.

> It seems to me that most of what it does, and more besides, 
> would be easily in the reach of any good CMS, but things like 
> generating timetables and registers is where it starts to get 
> complicated and outside of my experience.

I'm afraid then you have very little experience of what SIMS does.

There are lots of schools that have made the switch to Linux on the
desktop, and kept SIMS. It's usually by providing a terminal services
server to run SIMS on and a desktop shortcut to connect automatically.
Or I've seen it done using Citrix.

I'm not sure if the Cutter project are still around - they do thin
client installs in schools and must have had to address this before.
They'd be a good starting point.

Cheers

Alex

-- 
Alex Harrington - Network Development Manager
Longhill High School
t: 01273 391672 e: alex at longhill.org.uk