<div>Hi Roland</div>
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<div>to act as devil's advocate here (my favourite role) - one reason that systems are wary of the approach you suggest is accountability and risk management.</div>
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<div>Imagine that a school picks a set of third party plugins from several small companies to produce a flexible school admin, financial, teaching and learning and assessing suite. A year or so later all the data vanishes or the timetabling system fails or the security falls apart. The companies blame someone else, and some of the companies have gone out of business, the school's operation is severely compromised - who takes the blame and who fixes it?</div>
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<div>A single large vendor is often seen as the easy way to enforce the solution of this sort of problem. Or at least it shifts the risk to a commercial entity.</div>
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<div>At least that's the theory - we can all think of counterexamples that show it's not by any means a guaranteed outcome. And large companies are not immune to financial failure... </div>
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<div>On the other hand an open architecture allows other companies to step in to solve problems when they occur,</div>
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<div>Not saying I agree with the large-vendor approach, but to change those views we need to understand what they are based on.</div>
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<div>Ken, TASITE Tasmania,<br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Roland Gesthuizen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rgesthuizen@gmail.com">rgesthuizen@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Yes, all that money sailing off to an overseas vendor. I guess the world needs some stimulating to get the economy moving and we are doing our part. Given that only 20% of our families speak English at home, I will be fascinated to know if Ultranet will be support most of the 40 languages (and regional variations) that are used at our school.<br>
<br>Interesting that they abandoned the timetable system but retained a reporting system. A more sensible approach would have been to pare things back and encourage cottage industry applications to plug-in, agree on an XML transport layer and just build a secure framework for private information. Create a smaller Ultranet that could plug into Moodle / Studywiz / or other learning management systems .. in a sense, do what CASES lacks. Make it flexible, web based with an open API.<br>
<br>Regards Roland<br>
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