ePortal Parents/carers access

[BaccyNet]

Hi all!

Just a quickie, I'm interested to know how many people have given parents/carers access to Facility ePortal from home? What problems have you faced by doing this? Any gotchas to watch out for?

Just getting a bit of a heads up, we plan on implementing parents use in September so I'm interested in any info that can be provided.

Many thanks!!

Steve

[maniac]

I was involved with this just before I left my last job, and it went fairly smoothly. The only things we had problems with were making sure all the siblings were linked correctly, not just that they're associated as siblings, but that the exact same record was used for the parent/carer who was given access, else they ended up with seperate logins for each kid.

We also reviewed all our student contacts, as we only grated access to priority 1 contacts. If you ring serco they can send you a simple SQL query that you can execute through CMIS which automatically does this, save having to tick the 'eportal access' box for everyone. Also a simelar one for disabling eportal access for priority 2 and priority 3 contacts, so you know precisely who has access.

We went whole school at once with the access, with a small trial group of 10 users first to iron any bugs out. Usernames and passwords were automatically assigned by CMIS and sent to parents in a letter that was mail merged from CMIS, nice and easy.


The other thing we did was upgrade our e-portal server to cope with the possible extra workload. It was running for about 3 months before I left, and there was surprisingly few problems with it. The most common reported problem we had was parents not being able to find the correct link on the website, or putting their login details into the VLE insted of E-Portal, then ringing us wondering why it won't work!

Mike.

[gaz350]

We are planning on rolling it out in the new school year. We are planning on using our progress days to hand out details ensuring the correct login details get to the correct people and with 1 on 1 or small group demo sessions we can ensure that parents/carers can make the best use of the information that is presented to them.

[TYO]

we are also very keen on this. one problem we are facing is old events logged by staff, not knowing parents will be able to view them in the future. I belive the behaviour module being release soon should give us the option of events being visable to parents or not. Also parents lack of access to the internet.