[kde-edu]: Centralised Data Storage

[Peter Murdoch]

A discussion with Inge Wallin on IRC led me to create this proposition
for the GSoC, but since I'm unable to participate I thought that we
should try to implement this anyway. Here's an excerpt:

>The KDE Edutainment project has significant potential to act as a
catalyst for the promotion of not just KDE, but also open-source
software in general when it comes to schools. >However, I feel that many
schools are reluctant to adopt software from the KDE Edutainment project
as it would simply cause them hassle in terms of both time and space:
these >applications are primarily aimed at an individual working at a
standalone workstation, and do not offer much flexibility in terms of
large-scale deployment.

>Take KGeography as a prime example: if a Geography teacher wished his
students to view a particular area that required downloading an
additional map, then each individual >pupil would have to download and
install the map which would take up a lot of time and redundant hard
drive space; not to mention that not all pupils will know how to install
a >map. Also, what if a teacher wants to hand out homework? They would
have to create the test and place it in each individual student's home
directory, then afterwards they would >need to go through each
individual directory and manually copy their answers back into their own
directory in order to retrieve them; this means that a lot more of the
teacher's >time is taken up than is necessary.

>Therefore my proposal is that KDE-Edu should have features specifically
aimed at centralised data storage and large-scale deployment, which will
not only make live >exponentially easier for the system administrator,
but it will also give schools an incentive to adopt open-source
educational software such as KDE-Edu by dramatically >increasing the
productivity of KDE's wide selection of education applications.

What's everyone else's thoughts on this? If there was a generic module
focusing on central storage in libkdeedu which individual apps could
harness, wouldn't it greatly increase kdeedu's productivity?