Software that is like SIMS

[Jarred1]

Hi all, do any of you know any software's that are very much like Capita SIMS.NET, and at a affordable or free price.

 

Thank you

 

Sorry to bother you all!

And sorry if it is not in the correct topic!

[speckytecky]

Sounds a bit like the Golf advert! I haven't heard of anything. SIMS is an incredibly complex set of software - hence the price I reckon. I don't think anyone has developed anything similar for free?

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[Jarred2]

Ok thanks, just a little question forget about SIMS and in your opinion what is the best free school management system you have ever seen?

[CyberNerd]

The best Free MIS was scholarpack. They open sourced it in summer 2010 and quickly got bought by a larger company who promptly removed all traced of the source code and sell it as a commercial venture: ScholarPack - The Cloud Based Management Information System for Schools

 

TS School seems to have stopped development: TS SCHOOL

 

School Tool are still going: SchoolTool: the Global Student Information System

[vikpaw]

FreeMIS?

PowerSchool is relatively cheap to run.

[CyberNerd]

Totally forgot about FreeMIS!

[jammmie999]

Sorry to hijack, but would anyone trust and use a MIS hosted in cloud. Or would this aggravate too many data protection issues? even if you could export and thus backup all data locally.

[CyberNerd]

Data hosted in school already gets transported to third parties, LA's and Govt. Hosting in a cloud isn't any different from a data protection perspective. It could be argued that its more secure if (an entire LA's data) is hosted in one place (the cloud) rather than spread over seperate sites with varing levels of technical support and security.

[zag]

Sorry to hijack, but would anyone trust and use a MIS hosted in cloud.

 

Yes, I'd have no problem with that. People had the same fears 5 years ago about hosted cloud email and its been a massive success in our school since we moved to office 365.

 

In fact I think in a couple of years time we will all laugh that we hosted these things on big bloated internal servers.

[vikpaw]

Sorry to hijack, but would anyone trust and use a MIS hosted in cloud. Or would this aggravate too many data protection issues? even if you could export and thus backup all data locally.

 

No problem with the cloud, you need to make sure you trust the company and their implementation.

Pick a decent 'brand' MIS and you'll be fine. Go with 99pMIS and the cloud might not be so good.

A couple of factors to bear in mind - you might need a backup route to the cloud if it's not on site.

Where it's hosted, e.g in Europe, Amazon, Google... and data protection laws.

Whether it's co-hosted and fault tolerant, or just sitting at their head office with no failover.

[GREED]

Sorry to hijack, but would anyone trust and use a MIS hosted in cloud. Or would this aggravate too many data protection issues? even if you could export and thus backup all data locally.

 

I am really confused by your question, what aspect of it being in the cloud (as in physically stored on a remote server(s) rather than your own servers.) is causing you concern? Access to the MIS via the internet is available in varying degrees of success, for every major provider in the UK today.

 

I think the responses above about other key and confidential services already established as a cloud solution are very supportive, perhaps you can clarify your meaning?