Uniservity Solutions - run away screaming.

[pete]

Uniservity Solutions provide a CMS aimed at schools that's ..... Look at the results yourselves http://www.school-portal.co.uk (gives a list of links to schools using the system).

 

It's slow, uses a shared database between umpteen schools and costs us 3K+ a year, and we're currently stuck with it.

 

Yes, this got chosen before I arrived. Yes we could have bought and put our own server in a data center for that amount of money.

 

Tech support is woeful, coding is messy. The helldesk is useless - everything is routed through someone who's been at the company for 3 months - and fails to respond in a timely manner

 

The product is a collection of proprietary stuff they've combined and they don't know what the component parts actually contain, like the Java-based text editor that contains executables wrapped in a .jar file.

 

I'm _very_ tempted to go through http://www.school-portal.co.uk, grab the contact details of the schools and offer them a better solution with shared-hosting using $OpenSource_CMS.

 

Perhaps this should have gone in FFS?

 

Having read the Coniston Computers post, perhaps some of you are thinking this could be considered defamation. Sadly, I have case references and logs to back up every complaint.

--

Unless _explicitly_ stated otherwise, any comments are my own and not those of my employer or any other organisation I represent. YMMV & AHSASS.

[e_g_r]

Bugger

 

Our Head signed us up for this late last year.

[Dos_Box]

We in Lancashire have made our own. You can take a peek at http://www.lgflcms.co.uk/ . We provide hosting and tech support. The entire package has been designed from scratch and we are busy selling it to many LEA's at the moment. Take a peek if you like.

 

*It's allowed for me to spam my own site.

[spc-rocket]

Hi,

 

Yes we're also stuck with uniservity as well and it not bad and some teachers have put content on it but like you said it is slow and requires internet connection i.e. no ingtranet available. While this does seem a good idea to not to worry about the backup and restore of data and maintainance of server, the bandwidth issue does remain.

 

Id students are meant to use this then say a class of 30 students logs on and tries to download 50K word document, it will have quite an impact on the bandwidth. We have isa server and decided to cache some of the content for quick access but doesn't see that great in the caching department - looks like the coders didn't give a damn about this facility - shame!

 

The SMT thought it was brilliant they signed up for 5 years

 

Ashok.

Edited February 17, 2008 by spc-rocket

[standunstan]

we got stuck with it after our deputy head thought it sounded like a good idea. grrrrrrrrrrrr

 

we thought bugger to it and used our lea to host a simple site with a view to setting somethin up ourselves in the near future

[olcinm]

We in Lancashire have made our own. You can take a peek at http://www.lgflcms.co.uk/ . We provide hosting and tech support. The entire package has been designed from scratch and we are busy selling it to many LEA's at the moment. Take a peek if you like.

 

*It's allowed for me to spam my own site.

 

I know this is a reply to something 2 years old but I hope people realise that UniServity has far more functionality than simply content management, although I do realise that this is what people are using it for in the main. So few examples of real interactive teaching and learning going on in many examples I see . What about quizzing, peer assessment tools, timed assignments, MIS integration for assessment, reporting tools, on-line mark book that does comments, graphical grading, push out to reports or on-screen display to parents with links to on-line pupil ePortfolios etc.

[Edu-IT]

on-line mark book that does comments, graphical grading,

I've not seen this feature before. How can I access it?

[FN-GM]

"run away screaming", can i join you?