School Information Systems have been on the rise ever since schools began digitising their management processes. Traditionally, the vendors of school management tools (like for timetabling, personal data management of teachers and students, etc.) also deliver wen applications that are tailored towards making the respective data available to those who need it.

The person model is designed to save all the data of students, teachers, guardians and any other persons of the school society. It tracks information like the following:

- Full name - Short name - Sex - Date of birth - Contact details (phone numbers, email) - Address details - Photo - Relation to guardians - Primary group (e. g. a class or a tutor group, cf. [@sec:Groups])

Except for the name, all data points are optional, so you can decide on your own (and on your local data protection laws) which data should be included in AlekSIS.

There are two important things you should know about persons:

**Persons are not automatically users:** That means that persons can be linked to an user account including things like a password and the ability to login, but they don't have to be. For example, your AlekSIS instance could save the data about parents, but you don't want them to login: In this scenario, the guardians are available as persons **without** user accounts.

**Persons are not linked to school terms:** As persons like students are not only at the school for one school term, persons are not linked to school terms.

### Manage persons

The main method to manage persons is the view under `People → Persons`. To add person to groups, you have to open the respective group and set the person as a member or an owner.

## The concept of groups {#sec:Groups}

The AlekSIS groups are a universal way to organise persons in collections like classes, courses, tutor groups, clubs, or any other division you could imagine. They track the following data:

Group name and short name

Owners (e. g. class or course teacher(s))

Members (e. g. students)

Parent groups (e. g. a class could be a parent group for a course)

Group type (e. g. class, course, club, etc.)

In contrast to persons, groups are supposed to be **linked to school terms** (but they don't have to be). For example, the composition of a class or a course varies from school term to school term. In order to archive historical data according to local laws, these groups have to be separeted which is solved by linking them to a school term.

### Manage group types You can manage your local group types by opening the menu entry `People → Group types` as an admin user.

### Manage groups Groups are managed on the page `People → Groups`. There you can search, view, create, change and delete groups.

## Import school terms, persons and groups from other data sources