The AlekSIS® team has found a security issue concerning client-protected OAuth resources. These are API endpoints (URL) protected by an OAuth client ID and secret, and currently in use only in the official app “Resint” for time-based documents. If an OAuth app without a list of allowed scopes was registered, this app could access all time-based documents, instead of none. To exploit this bug, an attacker would have to get hold of a client ID and secret for an OAuth app without a list of allowed scopes, for example by grabbing such information from a public web application using AlekSIS® for authentication.

The AlekSIS® team is proud to announce its first official release, version 2021.12, codenamed “Bruner”. Following a two years long development cycle, beginning with the merge of BiscuIT and SchoolApps in January 2020, AlekSIS and its official apps have been tested and improved in a closed beta stage, involving several partner schools headed by Katharineum zu Lübeck that provided insights in their practical use of a school information system. The official distribution release is delivered in form of the AlekSIS® Handbook, which represents the components of the distribution and installation instructions.

In the course of an AlekSIS community reunion at Katharineum in Lübeck, the team and its friends celebrated a small birthday party marking the de facto ten years anniversary of the project. Incarnation no. 1 – BiscuIT and the N@team Control Panel More precisely, ten years ago, in 2011, a group of people at Städt. Leibniz-Gymnasium Remscheid, lead by our current co-maintainer Dominik George, initiated the BiscuIT project in an effort to provide a feature-rich School Information System for the school.

The digitization of schools proceeds slowly, Germany is in the middle of the pack in this area, despite the Digital Pact, despite the various efforts of the education ministries to introduce learning with digital media as “distance learning” during the Corona pandemic. That there are projects that make hope was shown by the AlekSIS team at the Katharineum zu Lübeck. Here, software was presented which emerges from the field. Students and teachers are participated in the development process, program themselves, or give feedback for the application.

During FOSDEM, on February 1st and 2nd, 2020, AlekSIS was presented to a bigger audience for the first time, in co-operation with Teckids' schul-frei stand that holds a co-presentation for a curated collection of free software products for education. As Teckids' main goal is to get young people involved in free software, the presentation was mainly conducted by Andreas (13), Alexander (15) and Niels (15). The latter also co-presented in a general Community devroom talk about FOSS in education.

This article was originally posted by Frank Poetzsch-Heffter titled AlekSIS ist da! and was edited and translated for the AlekSIS website by Dominik George. The creation of a new software for management of plans, requests and information was celebrated in the computer lab of Katharineum. On Friday, January 3rd, developers from Teckids and the computer club of Katharineum met in order to to merge their projects BiscuIT and SchoolApps during a two-day sprint.

Today, there was a meeting with the teacher responsible for school books at Realschule Boltenheide. Shortly before the beginning of the holidays, a request for a new library management software reached us. We decided to include it in the BiscuIT school information system. Development of the first version of this app, called Exlibris, is split into two parts: First, we wanted to enable the responsible teacher to enter all the books and related data into the system.

Form July 15th to 17th, the core BiscuIT development team held its first sprint to get development of the first core features started. The sprint took place at Teckids e.V.’s partner school Boltenheide in Wuppertal, a school that has commited to using only free and open software in their education. The goal of the sprint was to get all core data models ready to an extent that it will be possible to start employing BiscuIT as the new school information system at Boltenheide with the start of the new term at the end of August.