gareth.davies

Lots more screenshots of school sites available at: http://www.frogtrade.com/designportfolio Click on the Frog 3.0 tab to see some of the newer ones

At risk of being flamed until I'm black and crispy: Frog use a SCORM engine built by a company called Icodeon - SCORM. Solutions. Now. | Icodeon SCORM 2004 Player. I believe it's the same one that's used by a number of the Becta "approved" suppliers. It wasn't free.... Personally, I think that a company offering to test SCORM packages for you before you spend any money on them is a pretty good thing - especially given we don't ask for any payment. You're right about SCORM - unfortunately it's more of a framework than a standard, which is why there are so many compatibility issues from one supplier to another. That said, the most common issue we find with SCORM content, however, is content suppliers not using case sensitive references to file names, which a Linux operating system requires. Typically this only takes them a couple of hours to fix. Hope this helps Gareth

From the horses mouth: Cost for Frog in a typical secondary school is 25K + 4K per annum (starting in year 2) Additional products are: Secure Gateway, and Parental Engagement Portal. Other than these two optional items there is nothing else, no hidden extras. This price includes hardware, installation, training, consultancy, bespoke build, etc. System has 2 x duplexed 1TB drives, if you need more space, we just stick some more drives in. Breakdown of what the "package" includes available at: Why is Frog so Expensive? « Gareth Davies’ Blog

Hi folks. There have been a few comments on this thread that Frog is expensive, so I've put a quick blog post together to explain my thoughts, as it actually isn't, it's just that we quote a price that includes absolutely everything, so I've broken it down a little bit to help make some sense of it - Why is Frog so Expensive? Gareth Davies’ Blog For clarity, the blog post refers to "Frog", it doesn't mention our "Secure Gateway" product, or our "Parental Engagement Portal" product. I hope this helps and doesn't offend anyone!

I spotted this post because it has the word Frog in it, but it's a question we're often asked, so I thought I'd send a reply. As a rule you should never update a third party database directly. The risk of breaking "referential integrity" is too great. You might notice that you've broken it straight away, you might notice 6 months later. Either way, you would have to be very "lucky" rather than very "skilled" not to break it. While I've never personally seen the CMIS schema, it's worth mentioning that there are all sorts of reasons why databases are not 100% normalised, typically related to performance. If you are not aware of the exact details of any system's intentionally denormalised data, caching tables, (design flaws) and so on then the data will inevitably become inconsistent. It's for this reason that commercial database suppliers typically provide an API - a set of business objects, or web services that handle read and write to the database while ensuring that the referential integrity is maintained. This approach also ensures that as the database is changed by the supplier in subsequent releases that your code doesn't break further down the line. We have been working with CMIS for a few years now. Initially we accessed their database directly through ODBC drivers. Serco have recently started a partner programme and are building a library of web services. I believe that they have only got as far as reading data out, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they provide web services to write data back as well. As tempting as it may be to just "get stuck in there", I would recommend patience. I would be extremely surprised if Serco were happy to provide support to your school if they felt that the school had been responsible for "breaking the data." There may well be other ways of skinning the cat though, it depends on exactly what you're trying to achieve. Hope this has been helpful. Gareth