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Student Administrative Software for Unix?
MISplice asks: "I have been searching for a Linux alternative to SASIxp which is a student administrative databse for K-12 schools (it does grades, schdeuling, and holds demographic and medical data). I have found the OpenSIS project which seems to be on hiatus and never past the implementation stages. Does anyone know of such a product or project that is under development? If not does anyone know if these types of products will work under WINE?" Have there been any new developments in this area since this article from 2000?
I don't know if anything exists now, but this is certainly something that could be developed or commissioned by a consortium of K-12 districts. Unlike higher education, K-12 doesn't have competition issues, so a cooperative project for a student administration system could displace closed-source software. The consortium could even generate revenue selling support, perhaps.
I don't know if you have considered Linux, but with all of the free software available to you, you should be able to put together a workable solution in Linux without spending a whole lot of time and money. When I hear anything about "organizing," I think "database," and when I hear "database" in combination with "Linux," I think "MySQL," which is faster than anything available on Windows. Hey, Slashdot uses it, so it's got to be good. It shouldn't be too hard to hack together a MySQL database and a simple PERL/TK frontend to handle queries. You'll find that having the source code available makes this kind of project extremely easy. Good luck!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Just search through sourceforge. You'll find lots of open source student administrative software projects. Many of them will be in the "planning" stage, which means they aren't bloated with legacy code! Also, some of them even have cool websites, and nicknames for the project leaders
Check out Bessie the Annhilator. It does a great job at grading even if it doesn't do the rest of what you asked. It's written in php and is very extensible.
Does Slahdot still use MySQL? I remember reading some MySQL gripes by Taco a WHILE back and some talk of NuSphere. Just curious.
Check out colleges and see what they use. I go to RIT http://www.rit.edu we have SIS that students use to get all their info about schedules, grades, etc. And it also allows all the faculty to grade us. Just about every university has some sort of electronic SIS nowadays. Try e-mailing a few IT departments and ask them what they use.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If you don't absolutely need open source, you could look into PowerSchool (http://www.apple.com/education/powerschool/). It's got scheduling, reports, transcripts, report cards, etc. Runs on Unix or Windows servers. I remember reading that the guy who used to head up Apple's OS 9.1 development moved over to the PowerSchool team.
In the amount of time it's taken you to research the project you probably could have built one.
I think that a lot of people don't realize how comprehensive this product has to be to replace a piece of software as complex as SASIxp.
If you can find several developers that understand what School Administrators need and enjoy hacking on this kind of software for free in their spare time, I would love to meet them. I would love to contribute to such a project but after following the OpenSIS devel lists for a while, it became inrcreasingly clear that the requirements are huge for such software. It requires people with a lot of intimate knowledge of state reporting requirements for each individual state, intelligent scheduling functions, information security, and still be simple to use.
I dislike the pricing, support costs, and vendor lock, and bugs of SASIxp, but it really is not a trivial task to replace this software with an free software alternative.
insert stupid thing here
Well, not sure exactly what you are trying to accomplish, but I can tell you that both SASIxp and its CLASSROOMxp counterpart both run perfectly under terminal server (we run Terminal Server 4.0 w/Citrix Metaframe [don't remember which version]). Running SASI on a terminal server will at least allow you to use linux based clients to access the program.
For those of you not familiar with SASIxp or other Student systems it would be a monumental undertaking.. for instance.. SASIxp has been around since the early 80's in a DOS based version and has matured from there. It has over 175 different databases, not to mention that most major files(grading, demographics, courses.. which each section can have 10 + databases associated with them) have 30+ fields each (in DB4 most of which can be transfered to SQL with an executable they provide) and multiple sub routines that allow data to be transfered between school years at the click of a button. I personally have been working alone in trying to create a similar system Using an SQL database with PHP as the interface.. I know nothing about PHP and am still trying to think of all the tables and logical keys to link everything together. Everything I have is basically on paper and will stay that way until I can get the database design the way it should be... So for those that say build it yourself.. I am trying but it is a grave undertaking just to make sure you have the majority of the Fields needed by schools. I would gladly collaborate with others to restart something Similar to OpenSIS just to get a basic foundation I don't even care about reporting yet I would just like a nice Database with a friendly UI to get the data and print it 1 page at a tiem.. from there I can worry about reports.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
A friend of mine owns a company that makes just such a beast..
http://www.cotcomsol.com/byteworks2.sql
I know nothing at it per se, except that it was written by a competant programmer.
I work for a large (75K students) school district in Ohio and am potentially looking to become a part of a coalition to develop an open source SIS. As several of the other posters have noted, this is not a small undertaking. However, we typically have resources that a number of smaller districts may not. I am interesed in promoting further discovery into how a coalition could build a robust SIS that could be shared by all. If anyone is interested, please mail me @ benderth@cmsdnet.net