Re: [school-discuss] Help!

[ptietjens <ptietjens@moriarty.k12.nm.us>]

Specifically, we're a k-12 public school in New Mexico.

Our current (VB/Access/Crystal Reports mess) student management program does 
attendance, report cards, and a whole host of other things mostly involving 
SPED and demographic tracking.  Most importantly, we are required to use the 
data gathered by the student management software to report to the State 
Department of Education mutiple times a year in order to recieve funding.

I'm the tech, so I'm frightfully unqualified to judge exacytly what we need in 
functionality on either end.  All I can do is take these links (so QUICKLY 
provided!  Thanks everyone!) to the relavant people and hope that we manage 
to dodge this bullet.  We had just finished convincing the powers that be 
that open source (and whevnever possible, open license) was the right way to 
go in the future.

Wish me luck!

On Tuesday 28 January 2003 09:58 am, Harry McGregor wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, ptietjens wrote:
> > Anyone out there using commercial open source (free as in free speech)
> > software in their administrative functions?
> >
> > Specifically, I've just been told that after a year of deciding to ditch
> > M$, our district will be purchasing two (two!)  major pieces of software
> > running with M$ SQL backends;  financial and student management programs.
>
> Well, I would suggest pointing out the latest MS SQL worm, that cost Banc
> of America quite a bit of $, amongst others.
>
> Could you name some of the products the district was looking at so that I
> have an idea of the sale you are looking for.  Also how many students are
> we looking at for the student management database?
>
> > I'd take DB2, Oracle, whatever!  At this point, I'm not even concerned
> > about open source (though that would solve some of the headaches we've
> > had with our existing apps for these purpsoses) as long as it isn't
> > Microsoft!
>
> The only "large" scale system I have dealt with at all is SCT Banner, that
> uses an Oracle backend.  This is what the local community college here in
> Tucson Arizona is using, to manage all financial, financial aid, student
> records, etc, with over 80,000 students.
>
> Any additional information you can provide will help in finding the right
> software for the situation.
>
> 			Harry