Anyone know what VLE Northampton council were pushing prior to LP+ ??

[Sam_Brown]

Purely out of curiosity.

[GrumbleDook]

Yes. :-)

In the days of yore ... the days when NCC had an in-house support team, when schools were connected by pieces of damp string and when the web guru in a school hand-coded javascript menus ...

Putting jokes to one side ... in chronological order schools have had :

Assimilate (a product by Ramesys, a version of which is still used in Lincs IIRC)
NeLP (Northants eLearning Portal - a solution from Ramesys that replaced Assimilate)
Community Gateway (a proprietary coded file repository provided by Fujitsu to replace Assimilate and retired at the end of the Fujitsu contract with EMBC)
LP+ (contract is completed at the end of August and cannot be renewed due to procurement legislation so schools must use their own funding to purchase their choice of platform, but NCC are going through a procurement process for a contract for a common, collaborative top-level site to still allow work between the LA and schools)

I've only really been here since LP+ and even when my school (as was) joined EMBC we never made use of Community Gateway apart from one or two LA projects (some really good D&T stuff actually, was most impressed)

[GrumbleDook]

Updated to the correct order ...

It is worth saying that the first two apparently were heavily content driven ... but suffered from schools saying they were inflexible and not the right content. Goes to show you can't win sometimes!

[russdev]

Look we ban people for swearing using such terms as Assimilate and community gateway.

Russ

[kmount]

Look we ban people for swearing using such terms as Assimilate and community gateway.

Russ

OI!! I think I'd escaped those

[GrumbleDook]

OI!! I think I'd escaped those

There is never any escape from the memory of them!

[sparkeh]

Bah! And I was having a nice evening until someone used the words 'Assimilate' and 'Community Gateway'

[Alprimo]

[QUOTE=GrumbleDook;496798]Yes. :-)

contract is completed at the end of August and cannot be renewed due to procurement legislation so schools must use their own funding to purchase their choice of platform


Is this nationwide or just specific to Northampton?

[GrumbleDook]

In Northants we went through an OJEU tender for the original contract. This had set periods of extension and we are not legally allowed to extend it after those set periods. We *have* to go through another procurement as part of our legal requirements. That is how it works ... different LAs will have done contracts at different times and for different lengths, often centred around what funding streams are/were available and other LA projects. Northants is in no way reflective of the whole of the country but you will come across similar models and on similar timescales.