Is SIMS Connected a viable option now?

[BB90]

A few of my schools have expressed interest in contracting with ESS for SIMS Connected to offer them a log in anywhere experience for SIMS. I've seen a lot of negative impressions of it from threads late last year, but are these mostly teething issues from its first release?

 

Has anyone had recent user experience with Connected who can vouch for its current state and whether it is worth the price increase for the school?

 

They have also had the option for SIMS Next gen, which from what I've seen can offer certain parts of Connected but not the full Cloud experience?

[3s-gtech]

As a current user, I would not recommend it over on-prem - especially if you have a VPN to access it off site. It's very slow, clunky to log in to, the random disconnects and timeouts waste a lot of time, the password issues are ridiculous, it doesn't work with your own SSO, and any increase in price is frankly an insult.

 

I don't miss SIMS on-prem update day though. But I have to keep the old server VM as my TPC (just without SQL Server).

[mavhc]

There's many options to make a secure tunnel these days to act as a vpn, I've just set up Cloudflare tunnels today, auth with MS or Google or 15 other services.

[Aprice]

Correct me if I'm wrong, is SIMS connected just a fancy name for SIMS on a hosted RDS instance?

 

In which case that is what one of our customers has and it's pretty pants. Believe it's still running on Server 2012 for them(I may be wrong on that)

 

Admittingly we don't have to get involved with it very often, so make of that what you will.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Yeah sims connected is just a HTML RD web access. We have been using since July and it’s been terrible. Really unreliable and slow, the VPN sync is particularly problematic and causes lots of problems for us with real-time sync things such as InVentry and Classcharts. The support has been shocking as the SIMS support provider can’t do anything and the ESS default answer is speak to them or endless “we are looking into it” and will get back to you. It took 4 weeks for them to fix B2B sync when we moved across - we had so much grief from our LA.

 

It became so bad in mid September that we very nearly pulled out in the middle of term time. We couldn’t do registers or logon to get contact details for days on end.

 

A lot of our schools have had to buy lots of third party products to reduce the class teachers need to logon to SIMS - a lot of things they did previously in SIMS they’ve started doing elsewhere.

 

We are in the process of extracting our schools from the service and returning to on-prem.

 

I should say we are all secondary, primary schools may find this more manageable as their usage of SIMS is very different and much more lite touch.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Just to add to my previous post, lots of issues this morning and none of our SIMS connected schools can logon!

[howartp]

SIMS-Options and admin.sims.co.uk is up the spout this morning.

[3s-gtech]

Of course, that’s another issue with it - during periods of high demand (like snow days, strikes, first day back from a holiday, or a full moon), the servers really creak. Probably the RDP farm rather than the DB as we can usually TPC in still.

 

So when you really, really need to use it, it won’t work.

 

This hit us very hard in September.

 

Meanwhile your onsite server will shrug and carry on.

[k-strider]

This is helpfull as we are looking at MIS's right now and want to follow government best practice of cloud first and i dont really think this qualifies SIMS as cloud first - i was thinking things like Wonde and Sign in app with Sims connect is it true you need some sort of on prem vpn connected server to do all the integration stuff?

[David44]

Just to add to my previous post, lots of issues this morning and none of our SIMS connected schools can logon!

SIMS-Options and admin.sims.co.uk is up the spout this morning.

 

 

 

SIMS ID was down this morning (again). This would have been the cause of the sign in issues on various ESS products. A single point of failure takes the lot down.

 

[Michael]

Here's my diplomatic/impartial answer -

 

The class register is a legal requirement and being unable to complete it twice daily, both consistently and reliably would constitute a safeguarding issue. This also negates the fact it's a complete waste of everyone's time, both contacting support and expecting Teachers to complete the register on paper unexpectedly.

 

The MIS market has/is changing considerably, with statistics all available in the public domain if you search hard enough! Any senior leader reading this should take the opportunity to make an informed decision, obtain costings and make like for like comparisons of the many options now available.

[3s-gtech]

This is helpfull as we are looking at MIS's right now and want to follow government best practice of cloud first and i dont really think this qualifies SIMS as cloud first - i was thinking things like Wonde and Sign in app with Sims connect is it true you need some sort of on prem vpn connected server to do all the integration stuff?

 

Yes, you need an on-prem machine running OpenVPN with SIMS installed - this connects to the hosted instance directly. Wonde, Groupcall, MIS Sync etc then connect through this.

 

It helps us in that we use Class Charts (other connected apps are available) for registers and most daily use, and this doesn’t need to sync constantly so it’ll work when SIMS Connected is down. In a crisis situation where we need contact details this is not such a help.

[mavhc]

Is there such a thing as Cloud Last? If so that's SIMS

[geohanson]

Our VPN connection has just failed today (again...) and left us without Edulink for a couple of hours...

I'd much rather use on-prem SIMS and deal with Solus. Even the user creation process for SIMS ID/SIMS Connected is obtuse...

[Griffta1970]

Hi,

 

Did ESS let you go back to on-prem? One of our schools has signed the wrong contract and does not want to go to sims connected.....so interested if you have been able to go back.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Yes they let us go back but only because the system was so poor - we put in so many complaints to our account manager and technical leads they couldn’t really say no.

[Griffta1970]

Hi,

 

Thank you for that information, how long ago was this?

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We started discussions to leave in September after all the issues we were having. They agreed in October/November, but long story short we are taking our time to bring back in house to make sure it’s done right. We’ve done one back in house so far, and the satisfaction of it not going down when the rest of the connected one’s did was rewarding! The remainder will come back in house by September.

 

If you want to get out of it I’d speak to your account manager and just make a fuss about how slow and unreliable it is - you’ll probably have to keep mythering them for weeks with the issues (they won’t be hard to find). We basically said if they wouldn’t let us go back we’d move to another MIS as it wasn’t usable. In the end they relented and gave us a refund on the connected fees as well.

[Griffta1970]

Thank you so much.

 

We host the the schools database and the school does not want to move to sims connected as they made a mistake on signing the new contract. We have tried everything to get out of it but they won't budge! Really worried for the school if this system is as bad as what you and others are saying. It's a shame we have to move them to get them out of the contract!!

[985ach]

Has anyone had any success with SIMS connected? - We have it sat in our ESS portal awaiting for it to be agreed (although they say someone requested for it to be added no one remembers making that request)

 

The demo school they sent out for me to test seems to be quite responsive and a bit faster than my on-prem, although this thread is making me rethink making that final agreement

[Edu-IT]

It is usable, I’d say. It does have its issues now and again but for something that is SIMS I haven’t found it that unbearable.

[CTIDTech]

SIMS is working for us although we pull the data (daily) and then share the data using a third party to all the apps that need it (also daily). We also create and manage accounts (AD/Azure and Google) from the third party (or middle person) too so no need for the connect element and not required. Now the sync with SIMS is set up, we have no issues and all our users can sign into whatever apps they need even if SIMS is down.

[Miscbrah]

Goodness. Was thinking of taking the plunge myself, very glad I took a look around here!

[PotNoodleTech]

I think if your intending to spend more money on "new" SIMS products in this day and age then your living life wrong.

 

I wish I could get rid of it here but so far not able to.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We are still withdrawing at summer - our VPN connectors have not been working for a week.