I can just picture Houston Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Abelardo Saavedra calling up Jay Lee and his motley band of radio geeks at KPFT (www.geekradio.com) next Wednesday night:

Jay: Let's go to...Abe. Abe, you're on "Technology Bytes."

Abe: Hey guys, how ya doin'? Love yer show. Anyway, I've got a huge problem: I bought this web application (www.chron.com/disp/story....274792.html) for 14,000 of my closest friends to use....

Jay: What's it called?

Abe: It's called Chancery, by this company called Preston, or Pierson, or...something like that. Anyway, it came highly recommended. I mean, some of my colleagues in the same business said it was a pretty complete solution, and they approached me with this bid that I thought they were just crazy to make.

phliKtid: I'm Googling it now. Can you hear me tapping madly on my laptop in the background?

Jay: You're not Googling anything, phliKtid, you're IMing that chick you were drooling on last night.

Peter: Jay, were you paying attention at all? That was no chick.

Jay: Sorry, Abe. Please continue.

Abe: So, like, we tested it all kinds of ways, ran it through a pilot group, threw everything at it to see if it would crash, and it performed beautifully, so we were really impressed.

Jay: How big was your pilot group?

Abe: Oh, about 100 users.

phliKtid: Here, I found it. (www.chancery.com) "Leading provider of web-based student management solutions for the K-12 education market."

Jay: Ah, so it's web-based. Abe, are you by any chance in the student management business?

Abe: That's exactly what we do. We manage about 210,000 students.

Peter: Wow, no wonder you need 14,000 managers. When Jay was a student, it took about six people just to manage him.

Abe: It's a big job, but somebody's gotta do it.

phliKtid: Abe, you know, Chancery's website really sucks. This may not be applicable 100% of the time, but you can tell a lot about a vendor by its website. If there's too much Flash going on, they're overcompensating for something seriously lacking. And if the design is just plain ugly, it's obvious they don't care much about how they promote their product, so they don't get my business.

Abe: So with a business this big, y'know, when we roll it out to the whole company, it's like a completely different product, especially when a lot of the managers are using it at the same time. You type a few things into the database, click a button, and it makes some calculations. But it takes, like 3-4 minutes to bring up the next screen.

Jay: So there are times when, like, everybody is hitting the database at the same time?

Abe: Yeah, every three weeks or so, when we have a lot of numbers to crunch.

Jay: Abe, are you familiar with the term "scalability"?

Abe: Is that in Webster's Ninth Edition?

Jay: Probably not. It's a fairly new term, but it's derived from Classical Geek. It describes how effectively you can increase the user base while keeping the performance at a decent level.

phliKtid: What's weird is, I keep Googling for any kind of objective review of this product, good or bad, and I can't find anything. There's just a lot of propaganda from the manufacturers and Microsoft about how thousands of people in the student management business use it to keep track of, y'know, student management stuff.

Dwight: Well, the company that bought Chancery, Pearson, looks to have bought just about everything else in this category. Maybe they bought all the top hits on Google, too.

Abe: So anyway, guys, I've got all these 14,000 friends kinda pissed at me now, 'cause they have to use this software that crashes on them, and when it's not crashing, it crawls. I mean, they submit their numbers, and they can little go make a pot of coffee, come back, and it still isn't done.

phliKtid: I wanna go back to Jay's word, "scalability." It seems like most of the other student management firms that use this thing are smaller than yours. They may not have the same problem, or at least not as bad. If you're gonna deploy something like this, you need to have the most bad-ass servers you can possibly find. Plus, uh, do you have 100-base cable in your facilities?

Abe: Wuzzat?

phliKtid: High-speed fiber-optic cable, 100 megabits per second data transfer. If you don't have that, replace your cable ASAP. That will cut out some of the lag, even if the phone lines between your buildings and the servers are outdated.

Abe: That may get expensive. We have over 200 buildings, and a lot of them need some basic repairs.

Dwight: One word for you, Abe: BONDS.

Jay: Yeah, you really ought to consider either a capital campaign or floating some serious bonds ASAP. Meanwhile, if you really want this thing to work, first, reinstall Windows.

Abe: Why reinstall Windows?

Jay: 'Cause that's what tech support dudes always say. Anyway, second, get out the company credit card, and invest in your infrastructure. Put together a cluster of the most powerful IBM servers you can find. Third, start upgrading your cabling. If that doesn't work, I would recommend shopping around for another solution.

Abe: OK, thanks.

Jay: Don't mention it. Now let's go to...line 2, Linus, welcome to "Technology Bytes."

Linus: Hi, guys. Listen, I built this operating system that, like, almost never crashes, and I'm wondering how I can market it to make it compete with Windows and Mac.