Schoolcomms future development

[Cache]

Can I ask a couple of, probably, stupid questions?

 

1. On my Android version of the App, clicking on About Me/School Details gives me No Information, this may be because there is ano information or the school isn't using this part of School Gateway - is that because these are only part of the Online Reporting part (or because I am registered as a member of Staff rather then a parent)? If not, how can we get it so that details appear on the School Details part?

2. Clicking on Messages, under the school name it has a reply sat there which I sent when we were testing the App before promoting it. Tapping on the school name doesn't bring up the old reply - is this because it was in the Old app and not been brought across or something else?

 

Edit: Just noticed on the School Gateway webpage, your Find Out More link doesn't actually go anywhere either....

Edited March 23, 2014 by Cache

[Schoolcomms]

Can I ask a couple of, probably, stupid questions?

 

1. On my Android version of the App, clicking on About Me/School Details gives me No Information, this may be because there is ano information or the school isn't using this part of School Gateway - is that because these are only part of the Online Reporting part (or because I am registered as a member of Staff rather then a parent)? If not, how can we get it so that details appear on the School Details part?

2. Clicking on Messages, under the school name it has a reply sat there which I sent when we were testing the App before promoting it. Tapping on the school name doesn't bring up the old reply - is this because it was in the Old app and not been brought across or something else?

 

It sounds like your school have not switched Online Reporting on in Schoolcomms - but rather than try and diagnose here, I suggest you give our support team a call on 0844 445 7147, or PM me with your contact details and I will get them to give you a call.

 

Edit: Just noticed on the School Gateway webpage, your Find Out More link doesn't actually go anywhere either....

 

Ooops! We'll get something put on there.

[Cache]

It sounds like your school have not switched Online Reporting on in Schoolcomms - but rather than try and diagnose here, I suggest you give our support team a call on 0844 445 7147, or PM me with your contact details and I will get them to give you a call.

 

 

That'll cover it, I know we haven't switched it on (because we'd have no money to continue afterwards ).

 

Cheers

[Barcrest]

I would like to see the following added,

 

School Term Dates and or ideally School Calendar

School Bulletin for staff

[Schoolcomms]

As a short term view we thought that a lot of schools might choose to put their term dates in the "School Details" section - this is free form text for a school to enter so things like term dates, address, or other such information could be put in there.

 

We are thinking of putting a calendar in there, potentially linked to pull directly from the SIMS calendar. We'd be interested to get your feedback about whether you would want to share everything on the SIMS calendar with parents?

 

School Bulletin is another one we could potentially look at.

 

Good suggestions - keep them coming!

[Cache]

We'd not want to share everything from our SIMS calendar.

 

Ours is in a pretty poor state to be fair and it does have quite a few things on which Parent's don't need to/shouldn't see.

[Barcrest]

As attendance information is exported would it be possible to export class registers? Also to link with this would it be possible to run the sims export and only include certain information.

 

I thought this could be handy exporting registers/attendance 10 minutes after lesson start each period but I wouldn't want to export behaviour so regularly. This would serve 2 purposes, first parents would see quickly if their child was missing from a lesson but a more important use would be to have a register that could be accessed by the class teacher using the app in the event of a fire.

 

EDIT:

Something else that I posted in regards to data security on supportnet. Would it be possible for reports sent via email to be password protected zip files using either the parents mobile as the password or a random password that gets texted to their mobile number. There should be the option of nothing and the 2 methods I mentioned to give flexibility. A password protected zip should be enough to ensure the email is secure for DP purposes.

Edited May 7, 2014 by Barcrest

[Schoolcomms]

At the moment we only export AM/PM registration, exporting individual lesson attendance is quite a significant additional development. It's a potential future addition to Online Reporting (for both the use cases you suggest) so good to get the feedback - if we did lesson level attendance then we would probably split the import so that you could choose what to import when to keep the load on a school's SIMS server to a minimum.

 

We are looking at various options for providing more security around distribution of reports. There is always a balance between security and ease of use, and we try to strike that balance by talking to our customers. So far, most seem happy with distributing via email - but we are looking at alternative options as well.

[zag]

Just wanted to add to the request I just made to Schoolcomms for a simpler login system.

 

I'm just setting this up for the first time and we need a username that's more than 8 characters(sorry what??? why?) a password (ok can do this one) and a memorable data(again why??).

 

Our office ladies have resorted to writing this down on a piece of paper on their desks because its so complicated. And now we have 2 support calls because they don't understand why the usernames are different to their normal network login names.

 

Please change the login system to a standard username/password system like every other app on the planet

[vikpaw]

I made up the password and memorable data for them, pick something flattering like DazzlingBeauty77 and they'll be okay with it

Username thing we just happened to have long generic ones.

I do agree with you that it could be better - sync to Active Directory was supposed to be on the cards I'm sure.

[Schoolcomms]

Yes we know the login system for on the school side is now pretty dated. But it's also pretty tough to change. There is quite a lot of work going on to change some of the technologies Schoolcomms is built on coming up, and some of that will make it much easier to change the authentication model, this is why it has sat on the to-do list for a while.

 

Out of interest, do you use O365? any idea what proportion of schools do? if we authenticated to that would that work for you? MS are pushing it quite hard.

[vikpaw]

I think O365 is the way to go. Even if a school isn't using it, it's free, and longer term I can see schools moving in that direction, even if it's some kind of AD in the cloud on Azure. At least secondaries would be inclined to go that way. The other thing to consider, I'm not sure exactly how it works, is the Microsoft School Information Sync this is surely aimed for this kind of problem and would help with authentication as well as data transfer.

[zag]

Yes we know the login system for on the school side is now pretty dated. But it's also pretty tough to change. There is quite a lot of work going on to change some of the technologies Schoolcomms is built on coming up, and some of that will make it much easier to change the authentication model, this is why it has sat on the to-do list for a while.

 

Out of interest, do you use O365? any idea what proportion of schools do? if we authenticated to that would that work for you? MS are pushing it quite hard.

 

Yes we do use Office 365. Although I have no interest in connecting schoolcomms to cloud providers personally, I just want logins to be simple and manageable for our 5 users.

 

We just want to create usernames(and passwords) that are common to our normal username and password policies. Username should have no minimum or maximum length, and password should be the standard 8 characters or more with an uppercase and number. Memorable data should be consigned to the 1990's dustbin it probably came from

 

At the moment we've created our usernames like jbloggs1234 which is ridiculous to be honest. We also had to email the memorable data to the user just to get them up and running, which a box in schoolcomms specifically says not to do. This enraged me a little haha

 

P.S. I love schoolcomms, the rest of it is great

Edited November 30, 2015 by zag