[Sussex] Getting Linux into schools

[Dominic Humphries]

Alex Harrington wrote:

> 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.

I'll take your word for it, but I have to say that of all the people I 
trained with, and all the teachers I met through it, I've yet to meet 
one who has any experience of a reliable SIMS. I suppose it's possible 
that many of the local schools haven't upgraded to SIMS.net - I couldn't 
tell you what version of it was that I used. It's also perfectly 
possible that it wasn't set up properly, I can't say that I was 
particularly impressed by the IT support in some of the local schools, 
unfortunately.

> 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.

Haven't encountered this one, will certainly look into it, thanks.

>> 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.

Can't argue with that - I was a student teacher, my use of SIMS was 
largely limited to using it to take the register, or (quite often) 
cursing that it had crashed and I couldn't use it to take the register. 
I was lucky enough not to have to use it for writing reports, but I 
can't tell you how much swearing I heard from teachers that DID...

> 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.

Don't suppose you happen to know of any specific schools that have done 
this, by any chance..?

> 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.

Much obliged!

Dominic