plus4schools

Thank you @GREED for sending me the questionnaire. As its such a huge tome, I may be some time ...

@vikpaw, thank you for mentioning us and your 'flippin fantastic' comment made me smile:o. For those that don't know us, our website has a 'MIS evaluation tools' and a 'Buyer's Check List' to help decide which MIS is best for your needs. Choosing an MIS system is probably the biggest IT buying decision a school will make and so we thought that trying to help schools make a good decision would be very welcome. It's a shame that we come across so many schools where the chosen solution falls short of the expectations set in the sales cycle but they are then tied into long term financial commitments.

Good points. On VPN: VPN can be a halfway house solution to offsite access without going completely cloud, but the major problem apart from added complexity is that it’s unlikely to be scalable or very responsive in most situations because the outbound bandwidth on low cost ADSL lines is very limited. That’s not normally a problem for web surfing etc where the inbound data from websites far exceeds the few characters of outbound data you type as the URL to access it – the very reason why ubiquitous broadband was designed to give asymmetric bandwidth, which as we know is what the A stands for in ADSL. If you start serving content up outbound from the school either using a local web server or a VPN connection to an MIS server located in the school, the capacity requirement is reversed so you are in effect swimming against the tide. That’s bound to place a limit on the number of simultaneous users and/or severe reductions in response times. You also have to think that usage of school systems like report writers, parent portals and MIS in general etc is very lumpy because everyone tends to do the same things at more or less the same time and statistical bandwidth levelling that you find in other non-school situations doesn’t work. Furthermore, VPN can often be a bit problematical on home broadband connections for other reasons such as traffic shaping limits imposed by ISPs. Depending on the ISP and package you have, the actual throughput of data on VPN ports may be slowed as they prioritise other things like web surfing to balance the load on their backhaul internet connection at busy times e.g. evenings and weekends (i.e. non school hours). Most of the big name ISPs don’t even tell you that they are doing this and those that are honest about it usually offer a ‘home worker’ or a similar package that does give a higher priority to things like VPN at a higher cost. People in this forum can probably figure out the best way through the stuff ISPs don’t make obvious, but the average staff member? Even if they do understand the argument, I doubt many would change their ISP because of it. There’s also the security aspect of using VPNs to consider – if that bridge is breeched, then intruders have access to a lot more of your data than just the MIS, so you need to be really careful about how you set it up. You will also find that many low cost broadband routers (virtually anything sub £500) will have a fairly small practical limit to the number of simultaneous VPN tunnels that they can create due to the limited power of the internal processor, especially if you use a decent security policy. There’s always DSL lines and Cisco of course, but not many schools want to spend that sort of money... On the other hand, cloud hosting is designed to be scalable and provide reliable connectivity and you don’t need anything more than a basic cheap as chips broadband connection at the user end wherever that is, at school or at home. That also makes the case for web based MIS systems vs. standard apps running on a remote cloud server, because ports 80 and 443 used by web servers will always get high priority from any broadband traffic shaping.

Cloud computing has been around in the business world for a number of years in the form of programs like salesforce.com. Businesses require the same things as education does; security,value for money, ease of use, portability, instant access and so on. For individual businesses, these programs have made maintenance, upgrades etc of the program easier as it's taken care of by the supplier like Salesforce. Companies don't have to invest in their own technical expertise to make the program work. The difference between these cloud programs and some of the old, current, educational ones is the way that they have been developed. If you have an MIS, or any educational program, that's based on old technology, as BromcomPublicRelations outlined above, then you are still going to have problems and require IT people to solve them. If you use programs that especially written for the cloud or hosted approach then the requirement is reduced or eliminated. Some of our customers (and this is an example, not a sales pitch) don't have IT technicians, the program is just managed by the school secretary. In some small, cash strapped schools, the infrastructure doesn't exist. Cloud applications like Google Education and the like are helping fulfil the ICT teaching requirements, but without the infrastructure. That's not to say that IT expertise is not valuable in schools. What the best cloud and hosted services do is to free up IT specialists from getting bogged down in keeping the infrastructure working, giving them the time to do the much more skillful job of making sure the data is meaningful and contributing to the education of the students. But it's horses for courses. There are some good programs that have been built for the internet but not everyone in education feels comfortable going down that route at the moment. How about this for a barometer test: check how long until you next access anything on the internet whether it's a website, Google search, email, Facebook or whatever, using your computer at work, home or your smartphone. Think about how inconvenient it would be if you couldn't. I suspect the vast majority of us will conclude that we are already hooked on the internet and therefore cloud of one sort or another ...

Hello everyone I've registered to use this site at last. I've taught in maintained and indpendent sectors, been a network manager in a couple of schools, now I'm helping to run a business and I've written a few articles for magazines aimed at the independent school sector. In my spare time, when I'm not herding either a cat or a teenager, I knit, crochet and garden. At the last BETT, I had a brief chat to Vikpaw but didn't meet the rest of the team.

I think you have to differentiate between cloud based MIS and hosted solutions. Cloud MIS may run into Data Protection issues as the data could be spread around and stored outside the UK/Europe and be subject to different legislation. However, if you go down the hosted route, your data may be in the UK and governed by the UK Data Protection Act. Bandwidth may be a problem if you try to run a client server MIS or one that was designed with client server architecture over the internet. But if you use something that's optimised for the web, then there's no problem. Elsiegee40 - you're not alone in not having an MIS. Many independent schools of varying sizes rely on a combination of the school secretary, spreadsheets and database programs. Perhaps question your visiting salesmen about the location of the data to have the reassurance that it complies with the DP Act and that you can answer any parental questions.