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?

Comments

Interesting concept

[user no. 590291]

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.

Re:Interesting concept

[aminorex]

What K12 needs is zero-administration. That means
support staff and a recurring service charge.
I tried to sell such a project (open source scheduling/
grading) to the local public school service co-op,
but they wouldn't fund it. I went to the Minnesota
department of childhood families and learning, and
they *loved* my demo and prototype, which included
9 man-months of effort invested in collecting the
local and state-wide graduation standards to allow
students to see what they needed and how they were
progressing towards graduation while they selected
their classes, but they weren't interested in
funding it either.

Really, this is a gold-mine opportunity for an ASP
start-up. I've got the experience and even a lot of
the code and data to do it, but I don't have the bizdev acumen to make this fly. If you're an angel
investor tired of dot-com flim-flam and want to
do something that really helps people as well as
making money hand-over-fist, give me a buzz.

Re:i recommend Linux

[Jahf]

Umm, they already know they want Linux for the OS . They're hoping to now find an =application=. I would presume that if they have to take the time to reinvent it themselves, and they already have a working version on Windows, it may not be something that they have time to work on.

I have looked into this...

[DarkBlack]

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.

Re:Just build it yourself.

[stevenbdjr]

In the amount of time it's taken you to research the project you probably could have built one.

Obviously, you've never used a product like SASIxp, or worked in a K-12 school district for that matter. These are incredibly complex packages that handle everything from student records to financial records. In addition, they store the kind of information that allows state and federal mandated reports to be generated, and can generate those reports in the exact manner required.

You're also assuming that the poster is a developer, or has such skills.