StudyWiz looks like they're gone so where to next?

[HodgeHi]

I know a few of the guys/gals on here have an implementation of StudyWiz currently running. Since they seem to be going under (all my contacts for the company no longer work) where do we go to next?

We have only just begun to invest the time to build and develop our Studywiz. Currently we only have the pupils and staff in the system. Is it worth staying with the system and run it alone (possibly with no support) or just ditch it and find an alternative?

It would be a shame to let it go though as i quite like it. It was reasonably priced and worked very well. It had great functionality and worked quickly. It also had the ability to run on mobile devices and such. I would very much like to see it realeased to the Open Source arena rather than just disappear. I think it would make a great addition to the Open Source market.

The one thing I sure I read abhout though which I am concerned about. Apple discontinued their webobjects framework which is what StudyWiz is built on. Co-incidence?

So what are the rest of the StudyWizzers going to do?

Also what about the LEAs that bought into the system going to do?

Hope you can shed some light on this for me.

Thanks.

[powdarrmonkey]

I know a few of the guys/gals on here have an implementation of StudyWiz currently running. Since they seem to be going under (all my contacts for the company no longer work) where do we go to next?

Tricky one. There was a management buy-out a while ago, but I haven't heard anything about it since. However, we put in a support ticket last week when it died completely, through the usual channels, and it was fixed prompty(ish).

What concerns me most is that we're paid up for the next three years, but licensing is administered remotely so if Etech go away completely our deployment might just stop working overnight. We'd have absolutely no way of getting our resources and structure back out of it and into something else if that happened.

I'm more concerned than my boss I think, who has recommended we just sit tight and see for now.

It would be a shame to let it go though as i quite like it. It was reasonably priced and worked very well. It had great functionality and worked quickly. It also had the ability to run on mobile devices and such. I would very much like to see it realeased to the Open Source arena rather than just disappear. I think it would make a great addition to the Open Source market.

Unfortunately this is an unlikely scenario, at least for now. Studywiz is their only real cash-cow; there's no advantage to opening it up as it stands now - if the majority of their income was through support, not licenses, it would be a different matter. If the company will be broken up or sold off, they need to retain the software as a saleable asset.

I'd love to adopt it if the source was ever opened, but I don't speak any Java. I'd happily be involved with infrastructure and governance though.

[dwhyte85]

Tricky one. There was a management buy-out a while ago, but I haven't heard anything about it since. However, we put in a support ticket last week when it died completely, through the usual channels, and it was fixed prompty(ish).

What concerns me most is that we're paid up for the next three years, but licensing is administered remotely so if Etech go away completely our deployment might just stop working overnight. We'd have absolutely no way of getting our resources and structure back out of it and into something else if that happened.


I'm more concerned than my boss I think, who has recommended we just sit tight and see for now.

Unfortunately this is an unlikely scenario, at least for now. Studywiz is their only real cash-cow; there's no advantage to opening it up as it stands now - if the majority of their income was through support, not licenses, it would be a different matter. If the company will be broken up or sold off, they need to retain the software as a saleable asset.

I'd love to adopt it if the source was ever opened, but I don't speak any Java. I'd happily be involved with infrastructure and governance though.

I'm in the same position but we host internally which is a little bit different. Studywiz bumped up the renewals and have been bugging me through e-mail, I have a mobile number and an e-mail address for them if you'd like them, give me a PM and i'll pass them over.

The person I dealt with before works for another VLE now. I am worried with a total transfer and with likely BSF looming I'm going to have my time involved with other things, I've shown that moodle can work for us but to get the content from our Studywiz (we had a monster drive to get staff to use it) would take us ages.

It does look as though Studywiz is going down the pan, the crud about implementing a framework, no tel support is OK if you get a response from the helpdesk within the agreed SLAs, as far as I was aware our SLA was within 7 days and I haven't had a response regarding webdav since.... October.

[powdarrmonkey]

I'm in the same position but we host internally which is a little bit different.

To clarify, ours is also hosted internally but it does certain things overnight - like pull a dictionary from a server in Melbourne, which is what failed last week and had us totally helpless the next day. That's what makes me more nervous than anything else, licensing is also done like this and we don't know what else is should all the infrastructure just be switched off one day.

[dwhyte85]

We've had no downtime from that, I'd be shocked if you just faced the issue, it'd be presumably global? Unless it's so shoddy that it pulls once, fails and waits a day to try again and you were just very unlucky.

We've had no support though!

[powdarrmonkey]

Well our deployment was originally set up to restart at 3AM, and as part of the startup it fetches this dictionary amongst other things. It's now configured to carry on if that fails, but yeh it was pretty crippling until they fixed it

[laserblazer]

If Studywiz has gone, how secure is Uniservity?

[Myron]

Hello,

Yes, we had the unfortunate situation where we (Studywiz Support) had set deployment dictionaries to look for the latest version (from Melbourne database) at each restart. This might sound ideal from a keep-the-dictionary-as-updated-as-possible point of view, however it's certainly not robust, as we've all seen now. It was never a requirement for the dictionary to be updated each night (as you only really need a new dictionary if the client requests a change, or a new version of the application is deployed). In future there certainly won't be any dictionaries configured to fetch from the Melbourne server, if I have anything to do with it!

In relation to licenses, these a locally set on each deployment. If you were to discontinue your Studywiz contract, you can happily keep using the application until the license runs out. We're certainly not going to cut you off!

Daly, I had a quick look for any outstanding tickets from October and couldn't find any. I saw a couple of replies Andrew Briggs had sent to you - but let's pick this again, shall we? Please send any queries to support@studywiz, and we'll take it from there. Thank you.

Regards,
- Myron
Support Manager
Studywiz Pty Ltd

[dwhyte85]

Feel free to re-open ANY of my several closed tickets that were not resolved satisfactorily. I had no response regarding my continuing issues with Webdav - as I recall his response was upgrade the RAM on the box... to my reply of total disbelief.

You have my number, call me to discuss.

[ravenwood]

It is a possibility that it could all vanish.

[ravenwood]

Needed more than 1 post to post a link but here it is.

Etech asset sale query Tasmania News - The Mercury - The Voice of Tasmania

[dwhyte85]

i've only just seen this... eek.

[LeMarchand]

They appear to still be going - just had an email with their new support site details.

[dwhyte85]

Got that e-mail but didn't realise quite the state they were in, after initial contact from the chap in this thread nothing has been done and to be honest... we've just accepted webdav does not work how it's supposed to.

[HodgeHi]

We had a training day with Karen from Studywiz on Monday.

Are you using WebDav with Win Xp? if so there is an issue with XP and webdav connections in general apparently. Also mentioned on MS websites.