[enjay]

I'm about to run the academic promotion so our timetabler can start putting names in classes, and so on. Are there any particular gotchas which Capita have introduced since last year which I should be aware of before I start?

[GrumbleDook]

Log onto the Capita support site and pull down the end of year documentation.

This shold give you ideas about possible issues.

[enjay]

That gives detailed step-by-step instructions for what to do, which is invaluable, but doesn't include the little gems like "of course this will only work if you have no students in your database called Bill, the sun is shining and there's an 'e' in the day". That's more what I was after! :-)

[NetworkGeezer]

Just do a test run on a standalone mockup. This way you can even change the system date to see if there'll be any delightful surprises in September.
(Only problem is that this assumes there are no software changes before now and late August).

There are two parts to the process automated and manual. The automated is the promotion of one group of kids into the equivalent class one year group up. by assigning links. This depends on how well the new yyear titmetable has been designed if there are two many discontinuites you end up doing stuff manually like setting KS4 and sixth form options.

[enjay]

Well it worked.

The pastoral promotion went okay except for the slight hitch that you need exclusive use of the database when saving the promotion path mappings. Capita informed me of this when I logged a call with them, but for some reason omitted it from the 79 page instruction manual.

I think the timetabler still has academic promotion to do, i.e. class sets and such like, but he seemed happy to do that manually since it's such a small number of students affected.

So all in all, it went quite smoothly, which is often unlike anything with Capita's name on it :-)