[Year 12 IT Apps] OT - Ultranet functionality

[ken price]

Hi Roland

to act as devil's advocate here (my favourite role) - one reason that
systems are wary of the approach you suggest is accountability and risk
management.

Imagine that a school picks a set of third party plugins from several  small
companies to produce a flexible school admin, financial, teaching and
learning and assessing suite. A year or so later all the data vanishes or
the timetabling system fails or the security falls apart. The companies
blame someone else, and some of the companies have gone out of business, the
school's operation is severely compromised - who takes the blame and who
fixes it?

A single large vendor is often seen as the easy way to enforce the solution
of this sort of problem. Or at least it shifts the risk to a commercial
entity.

At least that's the theory - we can all think of counterexamples that show
it's not by any means a guaranteed outcome. And large companies are not
immune to financial failure...

On the other hand an open architecture allows other companies to step in to
solve problems when they occur,

Not saying I agree with the large-vendor approach, but to change those views
we need to understand what they are based on.

Ken, TASITE Tasmania,
On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Roland Gesthuizen <rgesthuizen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Yes, all that money sailing off to an overseas vendor. I guess the world
> needs some stimulating to get the economy moving and we are doing our part.
> Given that only 20% of our families speak English at home, I will be
> fascinated to know if Ultranet will be support most of the 40 languages (and
> regional variations) that are used at our school.
>
> Interesting that they abandoned the timetable system but retained a
> reporting system. A more sensible approach would have been to pare things
> back and encourage cottage industry applications to plug-in, agree on an XML
> transport layer and just build a secure framework for private information.
> Create a smaller Ultranet that could plug into Moodle / Studywiz / or other
> learning management systems .. in a sense, do what CASES lacks. Make it
> flexible, web based with an open API.
>
> Regards Roland
>
>



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