Technical Specifications
As well as providing a suite of powerful features Edumate has also been designed to be a stable and scalable web architected solution.
Being a truly n-tiered application Edumate can deliver the scalability needed by a single site campus up to a large group of schools.
Works with more browsers.
Edumate3 works with more browsers than any other web based application in its class. Currently Edumate supports Internet Explorer (6+), Safari 2, Firefox 1.x, Mozilla 1.x and Netscape. As a result of this, less time needs to be spent on supporting client software - anyone with a web browser on their computer can use Edumate! Users can now use the browser that they are most comfortable with, which again lowers the total cost of supporting the school’s user base.
Able to grow with your needs.
Edumate3 is a true n-tiered application. This means that a single Edumate application and database can be deployed across any number of servers in your environment allowing for fail over redundancy, multi campus or multi site operations and server load sharing. All of this is achieved without the need for expensive 3rd party licensing costs or advanced networking.
Replication - keep all your data in several places!
Edumate3 supports asynchronous bi-directional replication. What does this mean? You can have 2 or more Edumate servers replicating with each other instantly. Bandwidth is no barrier; Edumate replication will work over a standard dialup connection. Have a server at the school for high-speed local access, and a server at a server hosting company for high-speed home access. Both servers will stay in touch with each other painlessly. Is your school in a systemic environment? No problem! Have a server at the school, have a server at the group or admin office, and have another server at a server hosting company. All in touch constantly with each other. With Edumate replication no single site needs to sacrifice access or performance for the other. Easy. How about disaster recovery? Place an Edumate server in the main server room, and place another one on the other side of the campus. Live backup, live fail over redundancy. No data loss.
Secure and stable operating environment.
Edumate3 is built on sound industry proven-technology. At its core is the industry leading operating system for web-based technologies, Linux SuSE by Novell. Adding to this solid base are the Apache Web Server and the PHP scripting language.
The October 2005 Web Survey by Netcraft shows Apache being used by 69.89% of the world's web sites. Don't have any experience with Linux, Apache or PHP? No problem, the Edumate3 server is provided as a "black box" and managed remotely by our expert team of system administrators. All security updates, patches and monitoring are taken care of for you.
The Edumate server will plug seamlessly into your existing environment, guaranteed.
Fast, lightweight, server side database engine.
Edumate3 uses the advanced RDBMS Firebird - a powerful SQL database sever that provides a complete set of enterprise level database features. Add to this the pedigree of being used in production systems since 1981 and you know you are onto a solid choice. To top it all Firebird is open source; this means Edumate does not require any additional (often expensive) database server licenses. In addition to providing Edumate with an efficient, solid and stable backend, Firebird has a vast suite of Database Admin Tools that can be used with the Edumate database.
Firebird was chosen for several reasons, some of which are:
1. Low maintenance. Firebird doesn't need a DBA to be on site monitoring the database for performance, this reduces labour costs and overheads.
2. Backups. Being able to take real-time backups whilst the database is still logging server activity is a must. Backups can be scheduled as seldom or as often as required. Because of this Edumate backs up on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis meaning that if the worst does happen your data is well protected.
3. Multi-user. Edumate needed to be able to support between 2 and 1,000 simultaneous user connections, each being able to update, maintain and present data to users. Firebird far exceeds this requirement.
4. Speed. A high end Edumate installation can produce approximately 10,000 transactions a day from multiple users. Being able to update/insert data in near real-time is a major benefit. The database can expand between 300kb to 10MB per day depending on configuration so support for large files was an imperative.
Technical Specifications Feature List
- Easy template based reporting and advanced SQL reporting all from the one interface
- Full debtor management and billing
- Voluntary donations with tax receipts
- Interest on overdues calculator
- Bpay importer
- Advanced import tool, import your data from tab-delimited files
- Photo importer
- Database administration tool with full database access