e4education

[Norphy]

We had the MD from e4education come in and make his pitch to us today. The offer was:

Set up a website using their own CMS on their servers
Help setting integrating between a moodle site on our school site and that site

It will cost £5k to initially set up the site and either £1k pa to maintain it and keep it up to date or £350 pa to just maintain it. All of these can apparently be paid for with ELCs.

Does anyone have any experience with these people? How have you found them? Is their product any good? How is their support?

Thanks,

Ian

[beeswax]

I bet you've only seen their website in IE. try Firefox, and then see what it looks like, especially when you go to the Primary and Secondary Schools sections. If they can't get something like this right then I should look elsewhere. I notice that their portfolio doesn't feature any actual websites, just screen grabs. If you look carefully, you'll see that the URL in each address bar of the screen grab is the e4education address.
Try this link before you commit yourself. I've no connection with them, by the way.
hope this helps,
beeswax

[beeswax]

....I forgot to add that, like Edugeek, Moodle is a community. visit the site and see what it has to offer. Google Moodle and find out about hosting etc..
And another thing (it's not even Friday night), I once worked for a web design company which was commissioned to design, from the ground up, a large php-driven site for a well known school, with all the sort of content management functionallity that Moodle now offers, and that came in at a figure between what you're being asked to pay and 10 grand, including a years worth of maintenance and hosting. It may have been 4 years ago, but I feel the prices are still relevant.
beeswax

[beeswax]

..and of course, there's always someone here who knows what they're talking about when it comes to CMS.
beeswax

[Norphy]

Thanks for the comments

I've already looked at Moodle, I've seen what it can do and am impressed by it. I've seen the community it has to offer and I have a fair bit of experience with Mambo/Joomla! too. The reason the school is looking at e4education isn't so much to do with my and my teams technical skills, its more to do with our workload and the amount of time and effort it will take to get a system built, tested, staff trained to use it and to get it off the ground. As I'm sure you know the life of an IT Tech is a busy one and tbh I don't want the extra responsbility right now.

In all honesty I barely looked at their site. They sent us links for school websites which they do manage and, well, tbh my impressions weren't that great, I wasn't too impressed with them. However I did look at them with FF and they seemed to work OK from what I saw.

[GrumbleDook]

Yep ... this is one of the reasons why we have just picked up Digital brain (a limited licence for projects and departments only).

I'll happily let them break that first ...

[beeswax]

@GrumbleDook - you're probably right in this, and maybe I take on too much. What's digital brain?
@Norphy - if you take a look at the attachment, you'll see what I saw when I visited the e4education website.
cheers,
beeswax

[alan-d]

We just had ours re-done using eforecucation. (Due to lack of manhours to do it ourselves)

Overall they do pretty much what you ask them to do. If you want to chat pm me to swap tel numbers.

look at our site here - much is still being reviewed as most of it was transfered from our old site, the layout was pretty much a SMT decision but I'm working on making some changes

We use them for the web site only - we have our own setup for remote access.

[Norphy]

Yep ... this is one of the reasons why we have just picked up Digital brain (a limited licence for projects and departments only).

I'll happily let them break that first ...

I hate to put a downer on things for you but it is because of the sheer nastiness of Digital Brain that we are looking for alternative solutions. We have found DB a PITA to administrate, to add/remove users from, to set up access rights with, to add course content to and to set up student access rights on.

Beeswax, Digital Brain is a VLE similar to Moodle but (imo) a lot worse.

[Geoff]

So what are you considering as a replacement? Moodle I hope?

[Norphy]

Yup

[webman]

I'd like to know why people always put screenshots in word docs to increase the filesize?

W3 Validation of the site http://www.e4education.co.uk/ return 26 errors, and looks bad in firefox. Plus what a rip-off