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About Us
Educational Administration Data Systems,
Inc. (EADS), is located in Springfield, Illinois. We have been
working with schools and school districts around the country
since 1981. It was then when we launched our first nationally distributed product, TSAS (The School Attendance System)
which ran on Apple IIe
computers using the Corvus Omninet networks, and Scantron or NCS scanners. Our networked version for the IBM PC was
released in 1983.
Since the beginning, we've gone
through three major revisions to get to our current flagship
student information system product, eSchool. It runs
on any Window PC in single-user or networked mode. It
runs on Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003
Server, Citrix Metaframe, and Windows Terminal Services
based networks. Users can run as thin clients, fat
clients, and web-based browser clients. The companion
PC program for Pocket eSchool, eSchool PDA Edition, is
essentially a down-sized version of eSchool for schools and
districts who are already using other student information systems.
The present product,
Pocket eSchool, is our second venture into the PDA market.
In 1993 we developed a version of our then PC product that
ran on the Hewlett-Packard family of handhelds -- the
100LX and 200LX Palmtop PC computers which had a full
implementation of DOS 5.0 and
some PDA applications. Unfortunately, the concept of
using a PDA for serious applications, was ahead of its time. We were on the
sidelines as Microsoft tried to break into the PDA market
with its various Windows CE offerings. It took Palm in
1996 to shrink the PDA device and make it affordable and
finally noticed by school
administrators.
For years, our own users had been urging us to
develop an application for the Palm and, later, the Pocket
PC. However, it was not until a couple of years ago
that we felt that Palms had gained sufficient speed, enough
internal memory, inexpensive external memory cards, and
robust software development tools to warrant another
extensive resource commitment.
Also, we felt that Microsoft's latest efforts with the
Pocket PC finally got that platform up to a level that was
very attractive.
Those of us who worked on the present Pocket eSchool
project faced quite a challenge to implement some of the
features that we had developed over the years for the PC product. After we had developed some mastery of the software development tools and
designed the basic Pocket eSchool program, we were faced
with feature creep -- wanting to add just one more neat
feature! This feature creep added user-defined forms;
user-defined data items with data input, edit, and delete
capability; seven different thumbnail picture sizes; the gallery
picture display; data scripting; several data
encryption levels; a security system to control user
capabilities and enforce security policies; and a full natural
language query system.
The query system turned out to be very challenging.
On the PC, the natural language query system hid all the
complexities of the database schema and built the SQL
(Structural Query Language) statements needed to get result
record set. On the handhelds, the software tools
offered only a simple file system. One of us,
prior to starting EADS in 1981, had taught a course in
compiler construction at the University of Illinois which
dealt with all the tasks needed to implement the query
system on the handhelds -- implementing a simple stack-based
virtual computer in software, parsing the selection conditions
and sort order, doing the code generation for the virtual
computer, and then interpreting the code for each record in
data file.
While some may view these features as unnecessary
or over-engineered, we hope that some users will find them
useful. They are there should the need arise.
For the most part, we at EADS tend to be demand driven --
users often suggest enhancements that we would not come up
with ourselves. In that vein, we would welcome
your comments, suggestions, gripes, and complaints. Of
course, praise is welcome at any time!
Our users value their ability to talk to the
developers at EADS directly in order to have problems resolved.
Whenever an issue cannot be resolved by phone or email and
we are unable to replicate the problem in house, users can
send us a backup of their data to a secure FTP server which
we maintain on our premises -- users are assigned user
names and passwords to their private area on the server; data
can be dropped off or picked up. Once we are able to
replicate the problem, we either call the user with a
solution or update the software to resolve the issue.
All users have access to our "daily" updates (usually issued
several times a week, as the need arises) on the FTP server.
All known anomalies (bugs) are generally resolved on the
next "daily" update. Also, special
request features are added to the "dailies". Users
do
not have to wait for the next "major" release.
Users have used the FTP
access for disaster recovery. In one instance, a
user's power failure damaged certain of their data tables to the
point that our built-in diagnostic routines could not cure
the problem. The user got a zipped copy of the damaged
data to us within about five minutes. It took us less
than ten minutes, using certain third-party tools, to repair
the damage, call the user, and put the repaired data back onto
the FTP server. The user picked up the data and was up
and running within 25 minutes of the initial discovery of
the failure.
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