This is a reference manual for system administrators - people responsible for the daily care and feeding of a web server running The Manhattan Virtual Classroom. While you'll need some Linux/Unix experience to install Manhattan, once the system is up and running you'll find that you can do almost anything you need to do from a simple web-based interface.
Your job as Manhattan administrator includes:
Creating Manhattan courses and populating them with an initial roster of students and teachers.
At least occasionally adding or removing individual students or teachers from courses.
Deleting courses when they are finished.
Starting Manhattan's chat service, and keeping an eye on the logs.
Assisting users who have forgotten their password.
In general, keeping an eye on things like disk space and login logs.
Fortunately, Manhattan is quite stable. In general once you get past the flurry of activity of creating courses at the beginning of a school year, running an even very busy Manhattan server will take only a few minutes of your time a day.
Two other Manhattan manuals are available, a Teacher's Reference, and a Student Guide - look for them at http://manhattan.sourceforge.net. It's not absolutely necessary for a system administrator to know how to use Manhattan from a student's or teacher's perspective. However having at least a broad understanding of what Manhattan looks like to an end-user is useful. This manual makes no attempt to cover the basics of Manhattan from an end-user perspective, so you might want to at least browse through the other documentation.