[sims] SOLUS 3 - What's the opinion of it?

[Sam_Brown]

It's my understanding that SOLUS 2 is being retired in the Autumn and all schools will be forced to use Solus 3.

 

What's the general opinion with SOLUS 3? I'm not a big lover of 3rd party tools for deploying apps over the network and would much rather the tried and tested MSI route but capita seem to insist of doing things their own way.

 

So what is the general opinion with SOLUS 3?

 

My biggest concern is that I'd like to be able to turn off automatic updates. I tend to wait a few weeks before installing an upgrade. Is this possible with SOLUS 3?

[synaesthesia]

Yes, it's always been possible. Set it to download automatically and deploy only when you want. Always worth doing and deploying a week or so before you absolutely need to to make way for the relevant re-releases and fixes

 

Solus 3 works - at least now, v3.5 irons out a lot of the issues that made previous versions something to very much avoid. You can simply redeploy failed deployments rather than have to fart about with it now! (which for me usually meant giving up and just copying the whole FMS/SIMS dir over from a working station)

[Ashm]

SOLUS 2 support has been extended to include the Spring 2014 release as per the SIMS Technical Roadmap (resource ID 17910).

 

We're currently on SOLUS 2 and have very few issues, in fact I don't think we had any issues with SIMS not updating correctly on any clients for the Spring 2013 update. So I'm not in any rush to upgrade.

[Cache]

We work the same way you want to. Solus3 is automatically set to download the updates to it's database and download the updates to the agents automatically in advance of deployment.

 

We then pick the day/time we want to deploy it sometime in the future, normally a couple of weeks and I sit and set it off. I do schedule discover updates automatically for an early morning as that is a less critical system if it goes wrong, while my trust was almost there with Solus3 one bad update turned it sour so I wouldn't touch the autodeployment of SIMS.

 

To sum Solus3 up in one sentance, when it works it's great, when it doesn't it can be a right pain to fix.

 

The last couple of upgrades have been a dream compared to some of the previous ones we've done using it.

[Sam_Brown]

Nice to know you have a bit of control over what is installed and when. Thanks for the heads up everyone.

 

Ash - That's good news! I'm happy to stick with SOLUS2 as long as possible to be honest so cheers for the update on the roadmap.