by Nyle F. Landas, Technology Coordinator, Jefferson-Lewis BOCES, as posted on Tech WEBLOGS.
"With Winschool not longer being supported, CTE started investigating options for replacement Student Information Systems. One requirement was that the system be web based. After evaluating the current regional standards and another promising system that was being developed for CTE programs. The problem was that these systems all cost almost $50K to deploy the first year.
When the cost was noted, the fact that the regional standards were not geared towards CTE and the new promising system had still not been fully vetted, I started looking for alternatives. Since the world of Open Source offers so many quality products, I thought I would start there. I found three projects that were under active development - two of them still have a long way to go but one in particular was already in active use by schools across the Country - Centre/SIS.
After investigating Centre in more detail, using the online demo, reading some reviews from schools and talking with The Miller Group who supports and develops the system - I decided to propose a more in depth look for CTE. After our initial meetings were complete, we decided to ask for a quote and why not go for broke and ask for a fully hosted, updated and backed up solution by The Miller Group.
The bottom line? For under $10K for the first year, we were able to deploy a new Enterprise class web based SIS system. Additionally, with each of the other systems you have hardware replacement costs and must maintain the servers and data backup. With Centre since it is a fully hosted solution, this is all included in the yearly maintenance cost.
While Centre is not specifically geared towards CTE, has so far been covering our needs very well. As with any new system there will be growing pains but so far our experience with Centre has been very good. Once again Open Source is offering a very viable solution to commercial only applications.
You can see a demo of the Centre system at http://www.centresis.org/index.php/centre-sis/demo."
