I am about to start a trial roll-out of Gibbon at my school. The main issue I have to deal with, besides usual ones of data migration/importing, is making Gibbon not clash too much with ManageBac, what we currently use. We are heavily invested in MB for the last 2 years, and I need to watch out for pushback with Gibbon/ManageBac functionality overlap.
I plant to start by using Gibbon more in a traditional school management system role.
Curriculum planning and mapping will stay in MB for now.
As Gibbon convinces our community, we may look into transitioning out of MB in the future, but that is in the 2-3 year horizon.
What does the community think? Any useful advice?
Can I hide stuff from users to avoid sensory overload?
It sounds like you are taking a wise approach here, and yes this is very possible in Gibbon. In fact, it is one of the founding beliefs that Gibbon was built out of, that this kind of flexibility should be easy.
The best bet is to check out Admin > User Admins > Manage Permissions. Here you will see 5 default roles, and you can enable and disable actions for each role. If a role has no actions in a module, that module will not show up in the system for that user. So, turn off/on as much as you like to make the system do just what users need.
Extra roles can be added under Admin > User Admins > Manage Roles, and users can be assigned to roles in Admin > User Admins > Manage Users.
If a user has multiple roles, they will see the Role Switcher at the bottom of the homepage side bar, making it easy to swap between, say Teacher and Parent, without needing multiple accounts.