kallack

Plone seems to be the fullest featured 'heavyweight' CMS out there. CMSs are very variable beasts - from an application to make a pretty website (eg Typo3), via Joomla, Drupal, Xoops etc etc, to 'do everything groupware' (eg eGroupware). Plone is nearer the latter and is our choice to fulful many of the latest Becta requirements. I'm just about to install at school after trialing at home. It authenticates via LDAP and thus every teacher or student can have their own e-portfolio. It understands active directory groups and so each group can have its own shared area and every user can share stuff if they want. There is the usual CMS document management/review/publish stuff and a wealth of addins. Setting it up is challenging! Linux server, Python, LDAP, Zope, Plone, Apache (because it's web server MUST be proxied) and then configuring it all, but it works beautifully and has a clean interface. I've been researching this stuff for months and for organising the huge amount of documentation that a school needs - it's the best as far as I am concerned. If anyone wants to know anything else - let me know! Cheers Kevin

I can highly recommend Forensic software - it catches EVERYTHING. The incidence of internet/email abuse has gone way down since we started using it. How good you school is at DOING something about violations of your AUP? That's what makes the difference. Forensic's Software (Policy Central) just catches them! Kevin

I really can't recommend Moodle highly enough (and now the Open University are going to move all their content to it). Hosted on a local Linux server, it's fast and reliable. We also have SAMBA running on the same server, so teachers can click on a shortcut (on their XP stations) and be presented with a folder that containes the resources their students will see when they log in through the front end. That way teachers don't have to do anything hard like upload content! If you have the expertise, then setting up Moodle on a Linux server is trivial (or impossible if you don't). Although you lose some speed hosting Moodle elsewhere, it is worth it if you do not have the Linux expertise (or don't want to learn how to back up a Linux server. I imagine many companies and some schools (like ours) would be very happy to host a site for you for a fraction of the cost of any of the big players. For infomation, we had Capita's offering and it is dire! Staff and students are so much more enthusiastic about Moodle. The use that it made of a VLE depends MOSTLY on the quality of training given to the staff and their attitude - a whole school issue (my job!), then on the quality of the VLE, but not at all on the hardware or operating system - which is someone elses (our) problem. So long as the hardware is up to the job then all is OK. Our last server was a 1Gb P4 with 1Gb of RAM and an 80 Gb hard drive. It served the internet site, intranet, Moodle, various wikis and was the secure front end to our exchange server so staff could use Outlook Web Access - all without breaking sweat. We only changed it because the disk space was running out - not because it ran out of puff. Cheers Kevin