[sims] End of an Era

[vikpaw]

Time for a new signature:

 

OLD -

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Info Sys Manager @ K12 British International School in Saudi Arabia

[VMWare | Win2K8R2 | SQL2K8R2 | 4vCPU 2.6GHz | 16GB RAM | SIMS7.156]

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NEW -

Advice offered for professional use: if unsure, ask your support company; don't mess about.

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Add rep or give thanks to anyone that helps.

Info Sys Manager @ K12 British International School in Saudi Arabia

[DoubleFirst Engage 2014.10 VMware Win2k8R2-SQL2012] + [SIMS Fees|FMS 7.156]

FREE 8GB @Dropbox. http://db.tt/5hZCbq6

 

I've been meaning to post for a while, but kept getting diverted. If you didn't spot the change...

 

...we finally made the big move away from SIMS - it was a tough decision, and was something that was being considered at each annual renewal for a while with no real push, but then back in early summer 2013, we had to change our calendar to a Sun-Thurs week from Sat-Wed and all of a sudden a more flexible system suddenly became very appealing. By the end of the term, we'd done some tests, and made the decision to move to DoubleFirst Engage who i first encountered at the BETT_Show in Jan 13, and was really impressed with. www.doublefirst.com

 

There you go matt40k At last you know

 

I'll be at BETT so happy to discuss in person if anyone is interested in more details about any aspect of the process.

 

The key benefits are that we now have a portal that is intrinsically linked to the MIS database and a mechanism to store lesson plans and homework, as well as exchange files with students. Also, it's really flexible and allows us to have a different timetable layout for each year group (we need 3) in terms of period lengths, arrangement, start / end times of the day. It also has a built-in link to exchange, so we can email / mail-merge directly out of the program. Plus a whole raft of other extras and benefits, all for less money year on year, after you discount the initial outlay.

 

We host it onsite - which is a must for us, and now staff have access from home, and mobile via iPad if they need to take registers, and do all of their key functions. There is a desktop program which does the equivalent of the SIMS client and has the more advanced functions. The users get an excel like grid that they can customise so it's made a lot of our old basic list reports redundant, and it quickly exports to Excel too. It's also run from the server - so no headache when it comes to update time. Who needs SOLUS 3?

 

Updates happen monthly usually, so there's always plenty of new features being rolled out, and bugs get fixed fast - which is ACE!

 

The whole process really came about earlier than 2013 as we were looking for a VLE, and when we analysed our needs we found that what we really wanted as core elements were the ability to exchange files, have remote access to homework and lesson planning and something that managed our arabic week. On looking around, a lot of modern MISes have these functions built-in without having to tack on pricey and complex add-ons - so i guess it was always an option to change and Engage delivers for us, with local support and lots of schools in the region to call on for advice.

 

So i spent the summer of 13 doing trials and dummy runs with our data making sure it could go across, and spent a lot of time with their developer extracting all the info we wanted, so we knew if we could start the year on it. We ended up struggling a bit with the timetable simply because it took me a lot of time to implement alongside the other summer tasks (rolling over SIMS is a whole different story!) , and so had a delayed start on lesson attendance until the first half term, but luckily we'd already decided to parallel run indefinitely until we could move the Fees management over to Engage which is the bit we're working on now.

 

The primary school did their first ever online registers and loved it. With only an hour or so of training on the portal, they were good to go, and within a week or two, over 95% were doing it successfully every time. No more paper registers yay!

 

Over that first year, I spent ages writing reports, and tweaking the system to make sure it replicated all the tasks that we did in SIMS, and this is still an on-going process as I had spent 5-6 years making SIMS the central system change was always going to be hard. The upper school were a little resistant to the change, mostly because i couldn't provide the data fast enough, but i'm now pretty adept in writing reports in Engage.

 

The best bit, and my favourite is that in the report builder, you can inject your own SQL query, so can access pretty much any field you want, it doesn't have to come from a pre-defined list. So i can do complex joins to stop the cross products that sometimes happen in SIMS, and also use C# and the Report layout tool (Stimulsoft) to do some rather nifty things. The permissions are extremely granular, down to controlling what screen a user can see and what elements / fields on it are visible or editable, so though it's a pain to set up, we have much greater control over things. Plus it has built in auditing which you can activate on various areas as a backup too. Another really useful feature.

 

Unfortunately, we did have to say goodbye to our good friends @Schoolcomms - well, we still have the system, but no longer need to use it as have now got Groupcall Messenger linked in, which will make @GREED happy.

 

We still do run SIMS, but it's purely to store basic student and bill payer data, so Fees can be processed. I've just done some initial Fees setup in Engage, and will be doing some more early next week, so we can start the process of transferring that final process over to Engage. So i reckon another year or two depending on how things go, then we'll be down to just FMS. Who knows if we'll even move away from that. There's no rush, we want to make sure we do things right.

 

In terms of pursuing our VLE agenda, we're working with Frog to link in with Engage and provide lots of cool and easy to use classroom tools and activities. So far it's going well, and we've just got our server setup, and are looking at linking it with Engage to pull out student data and hopefully do some kind of single sign-on. Talking of which, all users of Engage use AD credentials to log in , and kids now have access to their data for the first time so they can see their timetables and more data is coming soon.

 

Summer 14 was probably the worst of my life as a data manager as i had to take over the timetabling, not actually creating it, but making sense of the one the old timetabler had created just before he left. It's such a pain, not knowing why things have been done the way they are, and then trying to replicate the structure and import the schedules into Engage. We used Timetabler for this, and after a long hard summer, finally had all the elements in place and all the last minute changes put in, missing rooms found, double bookings removed, and clashes resolved. I don't envy the timetabler's job, not one bit.

 

This year however, is in theory going well, except i'm still doing all the roles of the timetabler and dealing with the changes which takes up an awful lot of time. Plus they don't always tell you about things that aren't right, and then that affects cover, and then it needs to be adjusted last minute, or they only mention issues when it's reports time which is way too late to be making changes. I'll be glad when those extra duties can be given back. Thankfully, the timetable and scheduling is managed separate to the actual curriculum groupings and classes, so the two can be handled individually so long as you're careful not to put a kid into two classes that occur at the same time - which we denote by the class code.

 

So all in all, we're very happy with the change, it was the right time for us and it's made an improvement. I'm still a SIMS user and will be a proponent as always when required, however i now know how green the grass is on the other side.

 

Sorry it's a bit all over the place, i'll edit it later if it doesn't make sense, but as i said, happy to expand more on any areas of interest, here when i have time, or in person at BETT if you're able to come and visit us on stand E250 alongside Smoothwall . Also, i believe DoubleFirst will have our story in a case study flyer on their stand which is probably way better written than the above though maybe not in as much detail. )

Edited January 20, 2015 by vikpaw

[matt40k]

I was starting to think you were going to make me wait till Thursday @ BETT!!

[CAM]

Are you still on T6 for the timetable?

[vikpaw]

Are you still on T6 for the timetable?

 

No, we use Timetabler as it has an import routine into Engage. The first year I just manually copied in what had been created in T6.

[Sylv3r]

Excellent article - only fell asleep three times reading it but eventually got it finished

 

Hopefully bump into you this week sometime for a catch up!

[vikpaw]

Excellent article - only fell asleep three times reading it but eventually got it finished

 

Hopefully bump into you this week sometime for a catch up!

 

I would normally offer you a pint but don't want to risk boring you

[Griff]

:brave::brave::brave::brave::brave::brave: