SIMS and a patch for CASPA update

[speckytecky]

Currently our LA has taken us down the road of using CASPA for granular SEN assessments. Coming up to roll over time the CASPA team have upgraded the product - which seems to be good. However, to refresh data from SIMS we are told we need to run a patch on SIMS that is extractable from SOLUS.

Never having had anything to do with SOLUS before I'm wondering if anyone out there can give me a clue how to go about it - it's a newbie on our Admin Officer as well?

[Sarconia]

I don't know anything about CASPA but it sounds to me like the LA will release the patch to you via SOLUS. In this case, all you need to do is log into SOLUS (found under Start -> SIMS Applications route) as either SA or a user who has system manager rights and then it's pretty much an automated "click next" 5x wizard from there on out. You'll see the patch which is going to be applied and then just click next a few times.

Just ensure that you've kicked everyone out of the SIMS system (preferably by terminating external SQL connections and setting it to local only) before running SOLUS - I hope that helps.

[Sarconia]

I've just had a call about this from one of the schools I support. They were convinced it was a patch too... however, on further inspection.... I've found this website along with the followingCASPA documentation. It seems that it doesn't require a SIMS activation patch, just to install the software, import the report for CASPA and then export the results.

[speckytecky]

Thanks Sarconia,

I have had the following correspondence about this:

From CAPITA
21 May 2010

"Dear Colleague

Please note that for those schools who use a 3rd party piece of software called Casper you will need to run Patch 11799 which is currently available to download via SOLUS.
The is due to an issue that occurs when the data is extracted from SIMS and imported into this software. The problem is that some SIMS data is not being successfully exported, and causes a problem exporting ethnic data due to a date range issue within SIMS reporting. Patch 11799 resolves this problem and corrects SIMS.net reports to produce the required data.
Please note that ONLY the schools using Casper will need to run this patch."


From our LA
17 Jun 2010

"Thanks VERY much for forwarding the message re SIMS patch to sort out ethnicity data in Caspa. Earlier this year I tried to find out whether this issue had been addressed but didn't really get anywhere. ....
Apparently there's also patch 11944 that deals with ethnicity info in SEF reports so you might want to apply that for good measure.
I'm told that from within SIMS you go to Start and then the Applications folder and choose update & run SOLUS; you should then be able to apply any patches that are applicable to your school. That info is just from notes I've made and I can't check it as we don't have SIMS. The other way is to log into the Capita ESS update site and download from there."

The bursar in one of my schools ran the patches fine and dandy but the business manager in the other tells me she has been told (by Capita) not to run updates from within SIMS but to do them from ESS - had a squint there but these updates don't appear to be there?

[Sarconia]

Thanks for that

I think these two smilies sum this situation up, I'm doing both of them right now at the same time!



It seems like nobody knows exactly what is going on with this, Capita probably won't have a clue about CASPA and CASPA probably won't have a clue about any problems with SIMS.net reports.

I'm just going to try and tackle it one issue at a time, I'll install CASPA and see if I've any problems with the reports, if so then I'll contact Capita and tell them the report doesn't work. Patch 11799 does ring a bell though... I can't remember quite what for off the top of my head and in typical fashion, SupportNet gives me an error each time I click on 'solution search' again.