[schooltool-dev] cost of customization

[Tom Hoffman]

I came across this quote which puts a little of our IRC chat last
Monday about customization in context.  In the US market, PowerSchool
would be our biggest competitor:

"I recently was told by a friend that works at a district that they
have been looking at options to replace their homegrown SIS. They are
a small district and so PowerSchool was a natural choice. Pearson, the
new owners of PowerSchool, quoted them $28 per student just for the
software and data templates. That didn't include any help converting
their existing data, modifying business processes or working on change
management. In fact, Pearson quoted $225 per hour to perform these
types of services. I am not sure about your small district, but my
friend's district could hardly afford to pay a vendor $225 an hour
plus travel expenses."

http://educationtalk.blogspot.com/2007/05/open-solutions-in-education-lets-do.html

(this quote is by a guy who is promoting Centre, a free PHP SIS, btw)

Even a very mature and relatively easy to use for the end-user SIS
like PowerSchool has considerable costs associated with getting it up
and running in a given school.  While creating a free turnkey SIS that
will work anywhere in the world with little technical support is more
or less the original vision of SchoolTool, it is not realistic in the
medium term.

It is kind of like having an organization dedicated to world peace.
Just because it doesn't seem particularly likely doesn't mean that you
should change your mission to, say, restricting the world to medium
sized wars.  Likewise, it seems weird to come out and say our overall
goal is to create a framework that is only moderately difficult.  In
the long run we do want everything to be as easy, flexible, cool as
possible.

However, in the medium term, we're trying to improve on the numbers
stated above, knowing that they will probably never get to $0.

I don't know if that clarifies anything.

Also, note that in the future, providing support for SchoolTool may be
quite lucrative, even if you undercut Pearson by 50% ;-)

--Tom