School Management Solution

That is a lot of functionality to expect from one software package. I can't think of anything that does all of that.

Most school management software is divided into chunks of functionality. I will summarize some of the function areas and possible Open Source solutions:

Learning Management Systems -- All aspects of delivering course material online
Open Source options:
Moodle (www.moodle.org)
Sakai (sakaiproject.org)

Student Information Systems -- Enrollment, attendance and grading data of students
Open Source options:
Open Solutions for Education (www.os4ed.com)
ClaSS (www.laex.org/class/)
FOCUS (www.focus-sis.org)
SchoolTool (www.schooltool.org)
Centre (www.miller-group.net)

Finance Systems -- Purchasing, human resource management, payroll, accounting
Open Source options:
Kuali Financial Systems (www.kuali.org)

There are probably other categories, like Facilities Management, Food Service, Transportation, and so on, but these are the big three categories.

You could custom-build all of this with Drupal but that would be very time intensive and expensive. For the time and work that would take, you could buy a nice commercial package. Instead, I would look at getting some functionality from a variety of existing Free / Open Source software and using Drupal to fill in the gaps and pull everything together into a nice web presentation to the public.

I would probably start with Moodle, which will fulfill a significant number of your requirements pretty much out-of-the-box. Then, I would look at the others to see if they provide provide functionality that Moodle can't give you.

Finally, I would use Drupal to fill in gaps and pull it all together into a unified website.

You will also have to make some back-end decisions, like directory server, web server, file and media server, database server and so on. Finding products that run on compatible platforms will make possible that one back-end infrastructure can be used for all functions.

This is a very interesting proposition -- let us know what you find out!

Some quick thoughts on this:

As the other commenters have indicated, this is a broad range of functionality -- something I would consider a web presence, as opposed to a single site.

In crafting your web presence, I recommend compartmentalizing your functionality as much as possible, and then cross-referencing that functionality against user stories -- in other words, what users will be performing what activities within what sections of your web presence. This will accomplish a couple things: it will clarify the roles you need on the site, and will also help identify the area that will be fully public, a blend of public and private to site members, and sections that are fully private to students/faculty/admin staff. By clarifying these terms at the outset, you will simplify the process of building the presence you need, as you will have a stronger understanding of how the different pieces fit together.

The user story piece is also critical, as you need to envision the site from the perspective of an individual sitting down attempting to perform specific tasks.

With these terms clarified, you could build a good portion of this in Drupal for comparable or less to a proprietary system. Spending money on a proprietary system invariably means that you are spending money to buy into their paradigm of what they think your school needs. Spending money on customizing Drupal means that you are spending money on a tool that aligns cleanly with your mission.

WRT the other open source solutions that exist, I would strongly recommend looking at SchoolTool -- it's still an alpha release, but Tom Hoffman, the lead at SchoolTool, has a clear vision of what the app will become, and is sticking with that vision. He recently published a development roadmap.

Depending on your learning needs, Moodle or Drupal will meet your needs very well. At some point, this will lead to the question of grades, and whether your teachers want to grade in the learning space, or whether grading occurs external to the course. Also, the grading process is a separate thing from sharing those grades with parents -- these are issues with technological and pedagogical implications, and both need to be considered in designing a system.

With that said, the development you are talking about would be manageable within Drupal, and would be of comparable cost to buying into a proprietary system.

Cheers,

Bill

FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Hello, seen in the planning, someone achievement harmonize with drupal ck-erp,

The latter has a lot of resources for Finance Systems , Purchasing, human resource management, payroll, accounting, ERP and CRM some powers .-

I Fails to integrate it but I think it is a powerful option.

We, at Army Institute of Technology, Pune, India have been able to include many of the functionalities listed above. However we have not been able to privide a social networking kind of support.
We were looking at User Relationships for that.
is that a viable solution?

have a look here
http://beta.aitoss.net