Deutsche Fernschule e.V.

More than 10,000 German children in 139 countries make the German Distance Learning School a reliable partner for foreign workers who want to give their children a German-speaking education abroad.

Whether it is advice on choosing a school locally, German lessons to supplement their school abroad or full-time lessons to be taken completely at home, the German Distance Learning School offers the right support.

From a development aid worker in the jungle to an engineer on a large construction site in the Emirates, many thousands of families have already made use of the service of the German Distance Learning School since its foundation in 1971. Apple systems have been used at the company’s location in Wetzlar since 1985.

After the self-developed database solution was no longer up to the constantly changing business processes, the company decided to invest in an individual web-based software solution. However, it soon became clear that the desired functions that made the solution convenient could not be cost-effectively reproduced in an individual development.

“At a trade fair I discovered Daylite and realized that the flexibility of Daylite allowed us to work with a large part of our requirements in an affordable standard software,” says Sven Kornmann, master of the 30 Macs at the German Distance Learning School.

“Almost every one of our 30 employees now works with Daylite and it has become a central element in our everyday work”. Not only is the contact with customers and business partners handled with Daylite, but also the daily work with the many school children, who are looked after by the dedicated team of teachers, is done in Daylite. Tests are exchanged with the individual students and families via Apple Mail and are directly entered into the Daylite database via Daylite’s Mail integration. Thus, every teacher has quick access to the individual performance records of their students.

More than 50 GB of data are managed with the help of the Daylite database on an Apple Xserve from 2006. “The whole thing runs smoothly and is very well received by the employees”, says Kornmann, who also tapped into the powerful report engine of Daylite and developed custom reports and print templates. “The big advantage of Daylite, apart from the fact that it is much easier for us to search and find, is, above all, the flexibility with which we can adapt Daylite again and again to the changing workflows”.