New bespoke tracking/pupil progress software.

[Smee]

Not too sure if this is the right place to ask this. sorry if not.

 

My school have decided to have a new tracking/pupil progress piece of software designed.

 

The school know what they want it to do and have got that in place but have asked me what I would like to cover in the design. :/

I know the school want it to link to the sims system and that would mean opening ports for external access but can you think of anything else I need to cover?

sorry its such a general request but I can't think of anything else (all above my head and pay grade I think )

thanks in advance

[NotSoFast]

Sounds expensive. I wonder why they need this, to be honest (though I appreciate that's not what you asked!).

[Steve21]

Indeed, Seems an extreme way to do it unless it's something very unique, if you got the money it'd be better to talk to one of the big ones that already exists and pay for additional features added into those normally Else you could end up with an issue like the fact that every update needs paying etc etc and if it's just you guys using it could be very costly.

 

But in reality, why do you need to open external access? If they're creating it for you, host it internally if you want etc, no reason it has to be on their servers

 

In terms of other things, are you expecting it to be using "proper" SIMs APIs if so they'll need developer access etc, or is it just a SIMs export/CSV etc based?

 

Steve

[Smee]

Mine is not reason why.....

 

Its going to be hosted externally.

current software doesn't do or cover what the deputy wants hence the bespoke option.

I will find out what sort of access they need to sims.

And it is most likely going to be expensive but what can I say.

 

thanks for your input.

[liveman2]

I would be asking questions about security and what measures would be in place to protect against a leak.

[Smee]

just to update.

Meeting went well, company seem to be on the ball with education and what we require. Security etc covered and it looks like we are moving forward with them.

thank you to everyone for your suggestions.

[PotNoodleTech]

Be interesting to see how your company deals with read/write access licence to the SIMS database as historically this has been a prohibitively expensive requirement when creating custom software that needs to interface with SIMS.

[AJWhite1970]

Back in the day a large educational establishment I used to work at wrote their own in-house student tracking software. It launched full of bugs and within 6 months the code had become Frankensteins monster with all the patches, add-ons and quick fixes (yeah ok much like SIMS come to think of it)

 

Ended up using it for nearly 3 years until thankfully the decision was made to dump it and go for something commercial. Of course then there was all the fun and games of exporting the custom data into the new package...

 

Moral? Be careful what LT wishes for