SIMS - Accessing from Home

[forcryingoutloud]

Hey all, just want to run something by you. We're currently (after many years of pursuasion finally movingg away from an old in-house system to full SIMS. One of our AH has asked for all teachers to have access to SIMS from home. The SIMS Support manager and myself say no as we all know teachers like to fiddle and then blame someone else when it goes pear-shaped, but ee're prepared to let them fill in worksheet from Assessment Manager in Excel and import it ourselves.

Has anyone else come across this scenario and how did you deal with it.

[PhilNeal]

A number of solutions exist for this:
1. If your staff have laptops with SIMS on board, you can use a VPN to connect directly into SIMS.
2. You can use something like Citrix or Terminal Services
3. You can use our Learning Gateway
4. You can use spreadsheets and export/import them. (This option takes up more of your time.)

[localzuk]

We use Learning Gateway (provided by our county council) and they are also looking into a VPN solution I believe.

In what way do you mean they will fiddle? SIMS.net is set up in such a way so that staff can't break things here, and the learning gateway is also not breakable by staff as far as I'm aware...

[CyberNerd]

It runs fine on Citrix, teachers log in from home.

[dan400007]

We have all our staff connect to a Terminal Server for access to sims, gets around problems of sims trying to update over a wireless connection and then failing. Then we setup RRAS for VPN and restricted their access to the terminal server and intranet server.

Don't forget to get a Remote Access policy to cover your back and the school's. Will need to approved by the head and the governers.