[TYPO3-edu] what makes t3 interesting for edu institutions

[JoH asenau]

> > If it would be possible for the people who are sending out this
> > "Elternbrief" to split it up between people who gave them an email
address
> > and those who didn't, this would be highly appreciated. There are two
> > reasons why:
> >
> > 1. They can save a lot of paper and toner which is something that is
very
> > rare in most of the schools I know of
> > 2. They can make sure the letters arrive, since in most cases they are
not
> > really sending them via snail mail but giving them to the pupils, who
forget
> > to hand it over to their parents.
>
> Well, yeah that's true. There's only a little tiny problem. Afaik (e.g.)
> German schools are not allowed to save the information whether a student
> has internet or not. I don't know if this is true for other countries
> too..

They are not allowed to save the information unless the
student/pupil/parents registered as recipients for newsletters sent by the
school.
In this case they are simply forced to save this information otherwise such
a registration would be useless.

> And wouldn't it be a huge oranisational problem to store those
> information and print these letters only for students with internet
> access?

Don't know where the problem is: The teacher will know how many students of
his class have registered for the newsletter, so he will bring printed
letters for the rest and tell them: "Everybody who didn't sign for the
newsletter please take one of these and bring it back until next week."

> I mean you would have to take care about the parents.. Normally
> they have to sign a little piece of paper that they got those letters..
> If you do it via email you have to create a SSL server, hand out a
> secure login to every parent and even further you have to download and
> study those signatures. If you print the letters out (like most schools
> do) you just have to add a cross ( X ) next to the students names in a
> list..

Don't see a reason for that. It would be enough to mark the emails so that
the parents are told to send a read receipt (Lesebestätigung) - why should
this be done via SSL and secure login?
Direct Mail could even do it a bit more sophisticated, since there are
statistical tools implemented that could be used to track the returned mails
as well.

> So I don't think that T3 is currently capable of things like this. Prove
> that I'm wrong ;)

If you stop walking the usual routes and try to show people that it's the
21st century now and they can do a lot of useful stuff with a system like
TYPO3 I guess it would be possible.
Currently your arguments just show that some people might not be capable of
doing it and not TYPO3 itself.
But this raises the question: If people are not capable of understanding the
advantages of a newsletter system, will they be capable of understanding a
system like TYPO3 at all?
If not, we got two options:
a) stop our efforts and let them stay "old school"
b) make it our major goal to convince them that electronic media is they way
to go

> Anyway: What about adding this functionality to the according
> extensions? Maybe someone can do it...

What functionality should be added?
We got a newsletter registration, we got direct mail, we got double opt in,
we got jump URLs - it's all there.

The interesting thing as that you are currenlty behaving like one of the
possible clients, so maybe this discussion will result in all the arguments
we need for edu.typo3.org ;-)

Have anice weekend

Joey