OLEFA History

Welcome to my OLEFA history website. This website is a private site, it's not related to EducDesign or any other company.

I started OLEFA as a simple Content Management System (CMS) in 2000. The original focus of OLEFA was not the education market, it powered various other sites before it was first used on a school website. OLEFA was first distributed by a small marketing agency called Ka communications. I used OLEFA for my own web projects while Kacom used it for small business sites (they are still using OLEFA today btw).

In 2001 I developed a philosophy that described new ways to use technology in schools, using the school website as a work and publishing platform and using wiki technology to allow group work, sharing and collaboration. The Ministry of Education in Luxembourg was not interested in my work, so I finally decided to do everything on my own and to integrate the required features into OLEFA.

In mid 2001 I added various new features such as the wiki and the web based library management system to the OLEFA software. OLEFA was then finally installed on a first school website, that was www.roeserschool.lu (elementary school of Roeser, where I was working as a teacher back then). I also set up the OLEFA library management software for this school.

The OLEFA powered wiki and the new library management feature became quite popular. In mid 2002 Pino Fiermonte and Frank Trierweiler asked me to join them and to found the EducDesign company, and I accepted. OLEFA was since then distributed by EducDesign and the company also promoted the OLEFA philosophy. During the following years I added more and more features to the OLEFA software, and it finally became the market leader in Luxembourg's education.

I developed all major ideas and concepts for the OLEFA software and also created most marketing concepts, including all the official promo stuff available on www.olefa.com. I also did all the programming on my own until additional developers were employed in 2004 (OLEFA is written in Perl and runs on Linux servers. AFELO, the OLEFA sound recorder and the OLEFA painter are JAVA apps/applets).

In August 2008 I left EducDesign. Today I'm no longer involved in the OLEFA development and I'm no longer related to the EducDesign company. I'm now working on my own Open Source software projects, including CorneliOS, a WebOS and application framework. You may read about my latest projects on my website www.kirps.com.

Jos Kirps

(c)2009-2010 Jos Kirps | This website is not related to EducDesign s.a. | Powered by CorneliOS