Bruce Farthing, deputy principal at Otumoetai College, which started off with MUSAC almost two decades ago, said the college "outgrew MUSAC" so in 2000 adopted Integris, an international student management system. It eventually shifted to KAMAR in 2008. "Each of these programmes has very good features," he said, noting that the problem with Integris was that it was not widely adopted in New Zealand and so was poorly supported.
"By 2008, we were the only secondary school in the Bay not using KAMAR, so we moved to it. The situation now is that KAMAR has a total hold on the secondary schools market. In essence, competition is a choice between MUSAC and KAMAR, but the problem with MUSAC is that it doesn't handle big schools well and KAMAR does."
KAMAR's FileMaker-based school administration package manages all aspects of student administration, including student and caregiver details, attendance, health, ministry returns, staff details, student and class lists.
There are also subject, teacher and global mark-books for recording student results including NCEA, curriculum objectives and key competencies.
Reports can be linked with student results, awards and other achievements, and linked to produce student reports for emailing, printing or web uploads.
The system also has the capability of monitoring truancy.
Teachers mark the roll daily, then the school's attendance officer runs a filter to sort out students whose parents have reported their child will be away, leaving a list of unexplained absences.
The school can follow up manually, or arrange for the system to email or text parents directly.
Mr Lendrum began KAMAR with a simple system in 1999, then other teachers started using it and additional features were added.
Eventually, other schools began asking about it and the business began, initially part-time before taking off.