From your experience, what would the ongoing costs of supporting Moodle on an inhouse server (eg. upgrading, troubleshooting issues, etc). Once installed and setup how stable is Moodle from a technical/support perspective.
Thank you.
Ongoing Support Costs of Moodle following inhouse installation and setup
by Sue Mollins -
Number of replies: 5
In reply to Sue Mollins
Re: Ongoing Support Costs of Moodle following inhouse installation and setup
by Chris Kenniburg -
We have been using Moodle since version 1.4ish and only had one crash which was caused by something stupid I did on the server and had nothing to do with the stability of Moodle.
We rarely have any issues with Moodle as it seems to run itself.
We also run several advanced options such as BigBlueButton web conferencing and a variety of other 3rd party add-ons from the Moodle community such as PCast Podcaster, OU Blog, and several others.
In short, Moodle has been very stable for us. We have the occassional work that needs to be done on Moodle such as updating but that is not anything major.
Costs associated with hardware are really dependent on how many users and what your teachers will be doing with moodle.
In reply to Chris Kenniburg
Re: Ongoing Support Costs of Moodle following inhouse installation and setup
by ben reynolds -
Sue,
I wouldn't want to speak for my IT here, but to summarize, Moodle is essentially bullet-proof, once you get the Math symbols working.
If you don't care about Math symbols, you'ved got no problem.
There is one heck of a great documentation, by version, for Moodle.
You would be hard put to find a better LMS/VLS/ whatever the initials of the day are.
In reply to Sue Mollins
Re: Ongoing Support Costs of Moodle following inhouse installation and setup
by Andrew Davis -
Others have already commented regarding Moodle's stability.
Regarding the costs of supporting Moodle that will vary wildly depending on who is doing the support. Do you have someone on staff who will be handling any maintenance or will you be paying someone to come in and do it for you? If you're paying someone external that is also fairly variable depending on where in the world you are.
In reply to Andrew Davis
Re: Ongoing Support Costs of Moodle following inhouse installation and setup
by Colin Fraser -
Then again, if you stick with a bog standard moodle and do not do anything that requires third-party addons or blocks, or activities or modules, (except for Book, you have to have Book now that Petr Skoda has rewritten it), your maintainence will not be non-existant, Moodle is not perfect, but it will be minimal. You are likely to find that the trouble you have with Moodle will be hardware generated, where a drive falls over or a memory chip has declared it is not working, or OS issues, (to Windows Serve or penguin serve? The Penguin, I suggest, is a better option), or your system has been hacked. That is all the problems I have had, one one, admittedly small at 122 regular Users, system..
In reply to Sue Mollins
Re: Ongoing Support Costs of Moodle following inhouse installation and setup
by Marcus Green -
The answer to the question "how stable is Moodle from a technical/support perspective" is very.
If you keep to the core functionality and don't mind using a standard theme the costs of support and maintenance will be very modest.
If you decide you want to use contributed code, custom themes, integrate with other systems then your costs may be slightly higher.
Over the last two years Moodle has gone through a major upgrade from the 1.x series to the 2.x series which was a huge change. Assuming you are starting with the 2.x series it will be a while before you have to worry about any (theoretical) 3.x series.
When moving from 1.9 to 2.x some people found they were dependent on non core code (e.g. question types) and so there was a delay before they could move to the new shiny version, but that is not always a bad thing.