Visvanath Ratnaweera

I haven't tested yet, but expect two or Moodle instances to be capable of running on the same machine.

They could have URLs like http://machine.domain/moodle1 and http://machine.domain/moodle2 or http://alias1.domain and http://alias2.domain.

You just unpack the Moodle source in the appropriate directories and give each its own "moodledata" directory.

Of course, you should have two MySQL-Databases (on the same MySQL-instance), say user1/password1 fully owns DB moodle1 and the same for 2.

Hi Timothy

Sorry, I wasn't clear about the mismanagement: Embezzlement is a clearly an offence. In the case of Swiss Air it was not about pocketing money but about _wasting_. Like buying an inferior product for more money.

I was surprised that the Board was charged in courts. Switzerland is in this way very liberal. Recently there was a case about two Managers (was it ABB?) taking home over 100 M$ for their "golden handshake". On private protest, the govt. investigated and came to the conclusion "no criminal offence"!

Two years ago the local schools made a big shift towards Microsoft, although the community offered various solutions cheaper and on free software. On my question in a public debate, the Ministress of Education gave me a curt anwser "Breaking monopolies is not my duty!".

I'm too wondering when the tide will change

Management doesn't necessarily mean quality and efficiency. These type of stories are unfortunately not uncommon.

What could be done? For one, you need stamina. Just don't give up! And the second thing, don't play the dirty game, that'll back fire!!

The time will come when an even higher brass smells the loss by comparing some simple benchmark figures. Take for example the now non-existent "Swiss Air". They were living in heaven. Once it started falling down it took billions of public money to the drain. The saga is not yet finished.

There were board members who earned a "top range mercedes" by attending just _one_ board meeting per year! Anyway, to make a long story short, now the whole board face damage charges in courts!!

The moral: Times change.

This question remains unanswered. I would like to know whether the question is not clear or this behaviour is something normal?

As already pointed out by other posters, the work involved and the ressources needed are comparable to any other competitive product, on first approximation. I personally find, Moodle _very_ easy to install and maintain, admittedly for a "small" site - 1500 fairly active users. (What did you expect to hear in this list? )

Since you have 8 IT professionls and studied LMS for 6 months, I don't know what I can add to that. Since the discussion is about maintenance work, let's look at it this way.

The roles people have to play:
- system administrator: person who setup the server, do all installations, upgrades, adding and removing Moodle-modules, looking after the database, doing backups, trouble-shooting, monitoring, profiling and benchmarking. In the Unix world the "root".

- (Moodle)plattform administrator: (Moodle) user authentication, adding and removing new courses, maintaining the main page of Moodle, informing the users about upcoming changes, down times,
problems happened, ets. This is the "admin" user inside Moodle.

- The "teachers": Who add content, keep the interation with the students, asking admin for more

You must be able to map your people to one or more such roles and guess what and how much each person will inverst, perhaps on a semester basis.

In case you don't have the ressource, you could consider outsourcing the first two roles.

Looking at your coordinates (Melbourne) I think you've more reasons to use Moodle )