Calday Grange Grammar School

As former students of Calday Grange Grammar School, Wirral, Dan Hon and I were in a perfect position to propose a radical rethink of the way the school was managing certain information. Dan and I implemented the school's original intranet system in 1997/8 and, although it performed a task, it was too static, bitty, clunky and lacked a consistent design.

In the summer of 1999, we suggested an improved system to Calday, which they accepted. Within two weeks, the school was ready to benefit from a sleek, dynamic and distributed intranet system which moved the control away from the few students who were trustworthy enough to be given editing priviledges and the odd member of staff who knew what they were doing and placing it firmly in the hands of any member of staff who had something to contribute.

The Calday Network is yet another Information Management System which allows content to be edited using jargon free interfaces and shields the end-user from the intricacies of making their content fit within the system style. This allows the system iteslf to impose a more strict style which is applied across all pages, giving a consisent look and feel.

Design Considerations

The Calday Network had to fit within the existing network infrastructure at the school. This meant the server was restricted to Microsoft IIS version 4.

After splitting the schools web server and proxy server and restructuring the networks on which the hosts were sitting, the development work on the site itself could begin.

Since we were using MS IIS, we opted for a Microsoft Access back end database, allowing the staff to use MS Access in any disaster scenario. This combination was then glued together using Microsoft Active Server Pages, which presents the code in Visual Basic Script which is simple enough to allow fast development and debugging given the two weeks deadline for project completion.

After some initial consultations with members of the teaching staff, one idea that was proposed was a way of publishing worksheets on the server so the students could download copies of them if they lost the one provided in class. This proved to be the most useful and the most complex part of the system, implemented using a custom COM DLL.

The End Result

The Calday Network has now been functioning well for over two years. The main problem at the school is convincing the staff to use it, since many of them are still uncomfortable with computers and the web as a whole. This also meant that the system couldn't be as far reaching as was originally intended, and some systems which have been developed were not implemented due to costing and training problems.

The prime example of this is the worldwide part of the system that was designed to allow parental access to archived letters and newsletters together with social diary dates and a weekly comment from the Headmaster. Sadly, the school management could not see the usefulness of such a system due to their lack of familiarisation with the technology involved and so this extension lies in a ZIP file on my hard drive.

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