Is Becta loosening Microsoft's grip on UK schools?
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| Capita-SIMS, the powerful and dominant schools database provider, has been
| instructed by Becta to comply with the new interoperability framework. This
| move potentially opens up a large and growing market to solutions based on
| Open Source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.
|
| [...]
|
| Moving away from Microsoft SQL
|
| The school database market has been a closed shop for many years. Products
| from Capita and Serco, both based on MS-SQL, account for well over 90% of
| market share. In the case of Capita-SIMS.net, not only does it use Microsoft
| SQL , requires schools to use MS Office 2003 and has a MS IIS web server but
| it also has a non-interoperable API.
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http://www.siriusit.co.uk/myblog/is-becta-loosening-microsofts-grip-on-uk-schools.html
Related:
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| Problems found in an audit of Diebold tabulation records from an Ohio
| November 2006 election raise questions about whether the database got
| corrupted during the tabulation of election results...
|
| The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The
| engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot
| of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what
| occurs on an election night [and Microsoft advises againt using Jet in
| a complex environment]...
|
| The report mentions that election staff had trouble with the server
| crashing and freezing on election night....
|
| The report notes that with punch card machines election officials used
| to be able to determine definitively if all ballots had been counted
| in the results....
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http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/04/diebold_vote_da.html
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