schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> If you intend to use slogan to sell, let's associate it with the way school
> management thinks.
>
> Picture a school management staff. She has to deal with a lot of data and
> spreadsheets, scores, enrolment, time-table. So what does she think of her
> work? "It never ends." "I never get it all correct." "It's a lot of
> trouble."
>
> So to get her attention:
>
> School management with schooltool: Everything is in its place.
> Hassle-free school management.
>
> How you think?

Thanks for your input.  I should probably give a little more
background into the goals for the schooltool.org site (and
SchoolTool).

We're not really a "retail" operation.  That is, we can't support
hundreds or thousands of (non-paying) individual school users in
dozens of different countries.  We have a handful of individual
schools using SchoolTool now, but hundreds using it (a subset of it,
really) as part of the Critical Links Education Appliance, and we're
working directly with government ministries, ngo's, local vendors,
etc., to deploy and support other larger scale deployments.  So
schooltool.org is really aimed more at higher level administrators or
vendors than the clerk in a school.  Of course, the documentation,
etc. IS still aimed at the actual users.

The other point I'd make is that what makes SchoolTool unique is its
approach to school management but that it is global in its ambition.
This market is mostly regional and national.  A product designed for a
different country -- even an open source one -- is not necessarily
helpful to someone in a different country.  I think stressing the
global aspect of it is important to capture the person looking for
something that can be used in a big national project -- which is what
we want.

Perhaps we can combine these global/local concerns though.

--Tom