We didn't set up any formal or quasi-formal test sites for SchoolTool Calendar, because it was clear early in the year that getting it out in time for use this school year was going to be a close run thing. At this point, people are testing and using SchoolTool, and while some people may find it doesn't yet suit their needs, I don't think anyone is sitting around feeling burnt or profoundly let down by the status of the application, as they might have if we'd spent a lot of time convincing them to commit to a big SchoolTool rollout with their faculty in August as part of a big formal partnership.
We can't "play it safe" like this forever, however. As I've discussed on the list in the past, we have been semi-formally planning at least one test site, at High Tech High in San Diego, CA. Beyond that, there are still two options: * create as generally useful a user-configured application we have and send it out into the ether for people to use as they will; * focus explicitly on a small number of additional test sites, say, four in the Northern hemisphere and four in the Southern, and focus on a relatively customized application that will work for them, providing a high level of on-line support, then taking the lessons from those sites to create a truly finished, documented, generalized and locally customizable production SIS for spring 2007. I had been leaning toward the first, but now I'm thinking the second course of action is better. The parts of the system I'm worried about at this point are the "meta-systems," like demographics, reporting and import/export. Ultimately, for SchoolTool to be used internationally, these pieces need to be extremely flexible. We talked a lot about these systems in Vilnius and had a lot of trouble getting beyond handwaving. We just don't have enough experience with the direct use of these components to create highly flexible meta-components around them, at least without a high probability of things spinning out of control. To put it another way, in a pinch, Marius or Albert or Stephan could probably write a usable basic demographic system for a given high school in about two days. A flexible meta-system to allow admins to create demographic setups for their school would take a few weeks at least, but more importantly, would have more weird edge cases and unanticipated behaviors that would likely cause problems for months. I'll talk more in the future about what functionality will be ready for non-test schools by next fall. In the meantime, I'm drafting an announcement seeking test sites that I'll submit here for feedback in coming days. In the meantime, how does all that sound? --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
