School+Feedback

Feedback from Other Schools via phone or email: Your entry, then click SAVE is the upper right.

Tom at **Park School** I asked him about their Databases they have five databases they used to have 12. Tom is very comfortable with IR an FMPro solution I asked him about the support issue and he seemed comfortable with IR as he has a lot of FMPro experience.

Ry at **Kingsley Montessori** they have just moved from a IR FMPro solution over the Veracross he had mixed feelings as the user interface was very multi checkbox and not very user friendly which is not the feedback I expected as they had just finished a survey and where implmenting it. appert from user interface the other issue was that the server was off site which was good and bad good in the sense that he did not have to service it bad that if they lost internet nothing could be done, he seemed to think it was in the range of 15k per year and that they were very sccomtdating wth there pricing when it came time to play lets make a deal. The day I called he was just setting into laying out reports for the first time a challenge at best. I asked him about his experiance about IR and he was sad with the support but was happy with the product.

Susan Morgan **Shore Country Day** They are on Blackbaud and seemed happy with it, when I asked how the Mac users delt with it he said that they only do reporting on it thru a web based portal the rest of there admin team were on PC's and that was how they were able to use BB thruought the school campus Susan acknolged that it was not short money and was not clear on the actual cost involved.

Doug Alexander Lincoln School


 * Barbara Vincent, Admissions Dir., Meadowbrook School, Weston**

Meadowbrook uses Senior System for **__everything__** ...Alumni/Development, report cards, schedules, placement, Dean's Office Registrar, Admission and Business Offices. They are very satisfied and Barbara says they receive excellent support. They started with Senior Systems about 3 years ago. They waited until their then current Business Mgr. retired so they could start with the new systems at the same time. Senior Systems worked through Meadowbrooks's own IT people, but most of the work was done by Senior Systems. They contract out for IT services. Have 7 servers! Barbara would prefer we not call Charles, but email is o.k. He can be reached at cfk@cvm.com

Steep learning curve, but good training, which, of course, they had to pay for.


 * Doug Fodeman, IT, Brookwood School, Manchester, MA**

Brookwood (PK - Gr. 8, 400+ students) uses FileMaker for Registrar functions, Admissions, Nurse, Attendance, Professional Devel. and report card generating (they are on trimester system and can generate up to 8 reports/student/year). They have approx. 30 databases all together. Business Office and Devel. use Blackbaud with Raiser's Edge and can't be pried away from that system.

They are on their 4th iteration FileMaker and just 1 1/2 yrs. ago migrated to v.8 w/ OSX. This was painful despite FileMaker's assurances that it would be a piece of cake. So we're in for some pain no matter what we do!

All their development has been done by an independent developer. They started with Kevin McAllister (InResonance?), then 2 interim versions, then another independent developer named Dave Walton. He was a teacher, then and administrator so knows schools. Now he's doing FileMaker development. He's __excellent__, but not cheap, and while you'll get support during project develpment, it's harder to get support later, unless something he developed "breaks", since he's a one-man shop.

Note: Brookwood still sells templates developed for them by Kevin McAllister, much the way the fellow down at Moses Brown did. I believe he sold templates to Nobles, for instance. Brookwood modules priced by their Business Mgr. and we'd need to hire someone to tweak them for Tenacre and train us on their use.

Doug would be happy to talk technical details with Paul. He's at 978-526-4500, x6233.


 * Dolly Ryan, IT Dir., Belmont Day School**

BDS has 271 students in Grs. PK - 8, 74 full-time staff. Tenacre is exactly the size BDS was when Dolly started. This was a wonderful conversation, and I highly recommend we go over to BDS at some point and see what Dolly has done there. She obviously has a very thorough understanding and familiarity with FileMaker Pro, but she made the whole process seem not only eminently do-able, but cost-effective. They started with John Latson (the fellow from Moses Brown who had a stroke and no longer can work).

The Business Office uses something called Math 90 and Dolly thinks it's a good thing that our financial information is on it's own server. They can access the FileMaker databases for addressses, AFter-School info, etc.

They have implemented their school-wide database incrementally, starting with Admissions and a universal student database which have exactly the same look and feel so that moving information from one to the other seems easy. They actually have about 70 databses, and when I asked what some of the more obscure ones were used for she said Athletics, Enrichment, After-school. The Homeroom one is just what our teachers are looking for. She emails each teacher their database over the summer with all their kids (and photos), class lists, information about each student, so the teacher can easily send out letters to familys or anything else they want to.

The last dept. to phase in was Development since when Dolly started, Devel. had just bought new software they liked and weren't ready to make any changes. Dolly trains any teachers who need it. She also trained the Front Office/Registrar.

She likes this low-key incremental approach since she thinks all the big name products like BlackBaud or Senior Systems cost a fortune and provide many fetures which a small indep. school will probably never use. They're really designed for public school systems.

She gave me a few names for people we might use if we felt we couldn't develop modules on our own:

Tim McAllister (see Doug Fodeman who calls him Kevin McAllister), John Reed (617-699-7770). She has also taken her laptop over to a company in Natick who brainstormed problems (at an hourly rate) which Dolly then took back to BDS and worked out herself.

She runs everything off an iMac .... just switched over from an old eMaC recently. FileMaker doesn't need a fancy $5,000 piece of equipment. BDS is running Version 8 with OSX.

The best thing about talking Dolly is that she makes you feel that you will not have to abandon whatever function you're actually trying to fulfill at Tenacre in order to learn a monster system.