As a full-time teacher at the time, I was trying to develop a rewards system for my school (1-2 years ago) and eventually managed to produce a PHP / batch file solution to extract data / reports via commandreporter. I eventually decided to sell my rewards system and now about 10 schools have adopted it all over the country. Capita did catch up with me recently and informed me that I was breaching their licence by using commandreporter as a business... and so I now have a paid-for third party licence from Capita. Please be aware that you do need a licence if you ever want to sell a product that uses commandreporter! I was not aware of this. I can now use the licence to brand reports etc.
My rewards system uses data from SIMS to keep class lists up-to-date, display attendance data to parents and students, automatically create new user accounts etc. I have since developed a Moodle add-on for schools that use the rewards system and Moodle (single login).
Another word of warning - Capita are not impressed by the use of a batch file to run commandreporter as the username and password has to be stored in plain text. Although I don't see the problem if the bat file is not accessible to users on the network, I now have a single non-readable file that does all the work instead i.e. a Java app, which means it is no longer necessary to install IIS, PHP etc to extract and send data - makes installation simple. Having any port open to allow access to a school server has always sounded dangerous to me so the communication to my rewards system is only one-way (sent encrypted from the school server, via the proxy, to my server).
