The international SchoolTool development team and The Shuttleworth Foundation are proud to announce the release of SchoolTool 1.0 beta, a web-based open source student information system and calendar server for primary and secondary schools around the world. 

This beta release includes all the major components that will be included in the April 2009 release of SchoolTool 1.0: student demographics, attendance, gradebook, calendaring and reporting.  Future releases adding competency tracking and disciplinary intervention management modules are being tested at partner schools now.

Schools, local service providers, government agencies, vendors, hackers and other interested parties are invited to test and offer feedback and feature requests on SchoolTool in coming months, with the aim of readying production deployments in schools for the fall of 2009.  Calendaring and resource booking is a mature component and can be used by schools in production today.  

SchoolTool is 100% free and open source software, built with the Python programming language and Zope 3 framework.  It is fully translatable via the Rosetta service on Launchpad.net, with several languages already fully or partially available. SchoolTool is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.  On Ubuntu Linux, schools can have a running SchoolTool server available for evaluation and testing after a two-step installation process.