Renweb

In My Humble Opinion
1

For those of you who don’t know what this is, to quote Wiki “RenWeb is a school management system that provides a web interface for many common tasks done by schools.” Over 2,000 schools use it (according to their own website.

Anybody else have experience with it? As a parent, I’m sure I only see a little bit of it in action, but it’s pretty useful… if our school could learn to use it fully, that is.

For example, our Renweb portal is going to go down starting tomorrow until January 7th “so teachers can enter final grades.” WTF? Amazon.com doesn’t shut down when I enter a new credit card number, why should Renweb be shut down to enter grades? Is this common?

We also place school lunch orders on the site, but have to pay with a check hand-delivered to the front desk (this could be because the school might not have a Paypal account, though.)

Other thoughts?

2

Best guess for the shutdown is either known performance issues or suspected fears. I have no experience with Renweb, but if it can only handle a certain number of simultaneous logins, the school may want to ensure that teachers are able to get in, so they cut off the public access.

Amazon, OTOH, has massively more capacity, and sees on average, around 65 million visitors a month. (Not counting all of the cloud computing being done with their “excess” server capacity.) December, not surprisingly, is their peak, with about 90 million visits. Renweb would probably melt under that sort of load.

Year-end freezes are also not particularly rare. Where I’m at, programming and development basically stop in December so the systems are stable and able to run all of the end of year reporting and processing.