2. AlekSIS-Handbook
3. Englisch
4. Zen

# Introduction to AlekSIS

## Welcome

Welcome to AlekSIS, the Free School Information System! This handbook is a comprehensive guide on how to install, administer, and use AlekSIS and all included official apps. Its target audience are system administrators seeking to install and maintain an AlekSIS installation, people supporting the use of AlekSIS in daily processes in educational organisations, and end users who work with the software on a daily basis.

## On School Information Systems

School Information System, or for short, SIS, are software suites that help educational organisations with managing personal information about all members (e.g. students, teachers, parents and guardians) as well as organisational data like plans, pedagogic track records, and much more.

Generally, the goal of using School Information Systems is to help members of the school or other educational organisation to organise their work in learning and teaching, and to simplify digital processes, especially those that involve analytical evaluation, statistics, or information that is updated very frequently and should be made available to its recipients in a timely manner.

Ideally, School Information Systems also promote transparency between teachers and students and improve sustainability by minimising the need for paperwork.

## AlekSIS, the Free School Information System

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.

As most of these solutions are proprietary products, they tend to be limited to be used together with other software of their vendors, and do not integrate nicely with other software and with processes and data sets not in the focus of the developers.

AlekSIS, in contrast, is a generic School Information System that aims at being universally usable for all processes and data sets in any educational organisation, and at interacting closely with other software components employed in management and lessons. You can find information on the possibilities for interacting with other software in the chapter [@sec:Integrations].

The development and product team has set the following goals for AlekSIS, in their dedication to support learning and teaching in the digital world:

Create a high-quality software product, adhering to high standards regarding data protection, data safety, security, and stability

Comply with as many national and regional data protection and school laws as possible (cf. [@sec:Legal])

Provide an extensible framework, allowing schools or their supporting IT companies to create their own apps (cf. [@sec:Development])

Help coding clubs and classes to understand the development as deeply as necessary to use AlekSIS for learning and creating their own apps

Keep AlekSIS free, open, and transparent (cf. [@sec:FOSS])

# The AlekSIS core

The AlekSIS core provides functionality and data models as a base for all apps.

## The concept of school terms {#sec:SchoolTerms}