2. AlekSIS-Handbook
3. Englisch
4. Zen

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}

In AlekSIS, mostly everything is based on school terms. A school term is a defined time range which can be used to link data to it. Typically, such data are learning groups, timetables or class register records. Although their name suggests it, school terms don't have to be a half or a full year. They should depend on the way how you organise data in your institution.

For example, if you issue reports at the end of every half year, a half year would be a good time range for your school terms because the class register statistics are evaluated for school terms.

Anyway, you should create a school term before you start to import or create other data entries like persons or groups.

### Manage school terms

You can manage the school terms if you login with your admin account and open the menu entry `Admin → School terms`. There you can find a list of all school terms and buttons to create, edit or delete school terms. Please be aware that there can be only one school term at time and each school term needs a unique name.

## The concept of persons {#sec:Persons}