Re: [school-discuss] Master schedule building and scheduling

["David Frankson" <dfrankson@infinitecampus.org>]

> 1. Are you working with any free/open projects (schoolextra is neither,
right?)?

We are a commercial company, and we sell our software.  Internally we are a
big proponent of free/open projects and use linux, postgres, Apache Tomcat,
Saxon, fop, itext and dom4j in parts of our app.  Open source makes sense
for schools, and we have always tried to encouraged linux + open office.  We
have kicked around the idea of making a free version of our software, but we
are still a small company of about a dozen developers, and still need to
make payroll.  In South Dakota, we built their NCLB state system, and all
our district systems integrate directly with it for student record
transfers.  As part of that deal, all districts get a free "lite" version of
our district system.

We see alot of different home-grown student systems in districts, and most
of these represent huge wastes of resources.  A school district should not
have to fund an internal development shop to build their own SIS that is 90%
like every other commercial product.  I think the creation of good open
source SIS would help prevent this waste.


> 2. What OS does your infinitecampus scheduler run on?

The screenshots and demos on schoolextra's site are of our 5 year old Visual
Basic scheduler that ran on Windows.  Our new scheduler for this year is web
deployable(Java Web Start) Java Swing app that runs on all platforms.  The
scheduler and the Java foodservice app are the only parts of our system that
is not web-based.

We could have had a pure open source solution end-to-end, but our backend
DBMS is SQL Server 2000.  We need this to scale to over +100k student
districts, and postgres isn't there yet.  We do use postgres to spool
foodservice transactions on our lunch terminals.

Dave