"No good deed goes unpunished." Take heed. It took me years to understand this . . . > To pull this off, you need a team, a budget AND hard executive sponsors

"No good deed goes unpunished." Take heed. It took me years to understand this . . . > To pull this off, you need a team, a budget AND hard executive sponsorship. That sounds unlikely for a public high school. Also be prepared to fend off the professional magpies who will undermine you. "Why aren't you buying an Oracle solution? Their sales folks were in here just yesterday, and they can do all this and more. Most of it is already built in to PeopleSoft." And at that point you either whip out your snickersnee, gird your loins and leap with joy into the political fracas, or (just guessing you're not the type who's a joy-leaper into political bottle battles) you back away slowly, make popcorn and watch events unfurl. It'll be ghastly, and unless you execute an evasion plan you'll wind up editing fucked up XML configuration files and hating, just hating yourself for opening your big fat mouth, and hoping that there really is a hellmouth located under the school. Right there. Under that CD of PeopleSoft. What could be worse?