Sims Profiles - am I missing something?

[Jamman960]

Myself and our Director of Studies/Head of IT have implimented Sims Profiles for the first time this term, we've almost finished this reporting session(reports go home next friday) but we're less than impressed by the endless number of features lacking within Profiles.

The report writing side of it isn't too bad however once sessions go into review a complete lack of workflow appears - there is no way within sims of highlighting errors without allowing staff to change the formatting and if a report is set to "Not Approved" it goes back to the original writer without any form of notification - if they write reports for several years/classes spotting the returned reports without being notified in one way or another means the teacher has to go through every session/class individually on a regular basis.

Once a teacher finds the reports that have been returned and corrects them there is no way to mark the report as being corrected, it simply stays in a "Not Approved" state until the person doing the reviewing is notified or realises that the report has been corrected. I don't see why staff should have to chase each other around to get reports corrected or to find out whether its already been done when sims already has an internal messaging function and adding an option to re-submit a report for review should also be fairly easy.

We've resorted to sending emails out notifing staff that they have returned reports to correct and have told them to email the form tutors once the reports have been corrected. Is everyone else in the same boat or am I missing something? I can't imagine this working well at all in a bigger school.

[vikpaw]

I'm one of the few that use AM7 for reports rather than Profiles!

We have to have a manual process for the workflow and a lot of it is still done on paper and handed back to original author for corrections.

I'm looking forward to using sharepoint, where we should (i hope) be able to create our own workflow around SIMS processes.
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[Sivadam]

Our Senior Managers make a note of which Reports (or Sections of) are not approved and then inform the relevant staff. Yes there should be an automatic alert sent to these staff but this is a relatively new innovation. Maybe you should log a CR on SupportNet! We have found that, despite the problem you highlight, the checking process has speeded up greatly since the Review Mode was introduced.

[Sylv3r]

We use profiles and go through the following process.

Staff complete reports using Profiles webpart via SLG - we do not provide SIMS access to general teachers only HOY and LMT have SIMS access via the client all other staff use SLG.

Reports are generated when complete and e-mailed to form tutors who look through all reports and e-mail staff with the necessary changes

Teachers make the above changes, then after a set deadline - we put the reports into review mode

HOY then reads through all reports and makes any additonal changes via the Review mode in SIMS - after the final deadline reports are put together - manually converted to word documents then sent through the photocopier.

A long winded process but its what we are used to and we know it works - we have been waiting for a while for the review mode to be made available via SLG but it has been put back a few times from when it was originally mentioned as part of the SLG roadmap.