Hello,
I am taking care of the technology support at Mount Holly School. They
are currently not using any type of student tracking software. I have
been advocating that they start. I have been watching with great
satisfaction the efforts to utilize Filemaker by many on this list. I
hate shrink wrapped solutions that force you to do things their way or
are incomplete, Filemaker has enabled many to create solutions that
address their real needs fairly easily and it is a very robust
development environment and getting better all the time. I hope that
those classes were well attended and informative, Tommy et al, kudos
(to all involved as well, I just remembered his name first). I would be
very interested in obtaining any Dbs that you are using and any issues
you are having with getting Filemaker to do things. I have been a
Filemaker developer since 1994 and have been making it jump through
hoops for some time. I haven't worked with school stuff and am not
familiar with all the requirements you need to accommodate (I know
there are, or could be, new ones everyday) but am confident that any of
it can be dealt with handily, including centrally stored, web enabled,
cross-platform, SQL integrated, and anything else that might be
beneficial at the local or regional level (State for that matter). I
know that the special education group in the Ludlow district is using a
Filemaker solution, I haven't checked to see where it came from and if
it is a widely distributed item. It would be great to try to have a
default set of criteria that could be incorporated into any Filemaker
Dbs that are currently in use so that relationships can be made and
data exchanged between any that may want to share or concatenate
student information or state standards that can be distributed and
imported by all etc. Lots of ideas, many may be absurd but as a
database developer I am an efficiency maniac and can't stand to see
duplication of effort, redundant information or disparate systems that
can create mixed results etc.
Thanks for any info,
Ed Crelin     President/CEO




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