[Wylug-discuss] Commercial grade PHP applications

[Glenn Glidden]

Thanks for this Tim.

We have a campus agreement here and I fully subscribe to what you say re. a
full FOSS deployment, which is why we only use Moddle and an internet
filtering system which is externally supported.  Considerations I've had to
extend FOSS always come up against the support requirements.

I'm really just interested in doing some schools tasks in PHP but
considering its potential future growth.  Thanks for the sds.ac reference
though.

Glenn Glidden

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Fletcher [mailto:tim at night-shade.org.uk] 
Sent: 01 July 2012 13:02
To: glenn at glidden.org.uk
Cc: wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Wylug-discuss] Commercial grade PHP applications

On 29/06/12 10:33, Glenn Glidden wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Can I ask, as a general discussion, if anyone knows of any commercial 
> grade PHP applications or better still develops them?
>
> The reason I am asking is that I am looking (purely for personal 
> development at the moment) at the possibility to create a schools 
> administration system on a LAMP stack.
>
> I work in a school that is Microsoft Windows based.  Looking at the 
> cost of the software we use at the moment (c. £12K pa then Microsoft 
> Server/SQL Server licences on top) made me think what options were 
> there for a FOSS version.  This is also a single server deployment, so 
> no redundancy/failover or load balancing which would be an extra 
> software licencing cost.
>
> (The idea was also prompted by my doing a recent Microsoft Server 
> version upgrade to see all the memory on a 54GB box and Microsoft 
> deciding our legitimate licence key wasn't right and knocking it back 
> to see only 4GB.  Lost my virtualised email servers and remote desktop 
> for half a day because of that.  I want the control on my servers!)

I work for a large school (2000 students), and we currently use a mixture of
FOSS and propitiatory software.

The key point with FOSS software is that there is a trade off between paying
of licenses in the Microsoft world vs the payment of fair salaries to
support staff in the FOSS world.

The problem for FOSS in schools is that staff who can look after FOSS
systems well are for the most part not cheap and are harder to find than
sysadmins that can look after Microsoft based systems. For a school they can
understand and budget for a capital spend of 20-30k every few years for a
Microsoft server solution with a bog standard £22-25k sysadmin. 
The FOSS solution of spending "nothing" on server software and then having
to pay the sysadmin to look after it £35k+on costs (which takes it closer to
£45k a year) changes the values.

Just to complicate matters Microsoft have also got a licensing program
called "Campus licensing" that is extramely good value for schools, we pay
~9k a year for the full Microsoft desktop stack (Windows+Office on all 800
computers) as well as server licensing. Yes 9k is more than 0 but may very
well be less than the increased support costs of a FOSS solution.

I am not and never will be an apologist for propitiatory software but I have
worked for 13 years in a school which has made good use of and got excellent
value from FOSS software and I have had to fight these battles more than
once.

> So, wondering what knowledge and experience is out there for this sort 
> of thing.  I'm looking at a personal project to develop an admin 
> system in PHP but considering deployment requirements in the future.  
> Am I probably looking at a particular framework, etc.?
>
> Any comments?

We have tried to do this in the past and it's a massive undertaking and in
the end the people that where doing it have been spun off into a separate
company called School Data Services (sds.ac), they are now focusing on
behaviour management and reporting. If you get in touch with Andrew Rose
(he's the PHP monkey) or Ed Whittaker (ex-teacher) mention my name.

--
Tim Fletcher <tim at night-shade.org.uk>