[sims] Sims 8 new version?

[PhilNeal]

Just to be crystal clear - we will not be releasing the NI product in the rest of the UK for quite some time.

[GREED]

I didn't think you would Phil! A huge task to release a product as fully featured as SIMS and bring that into the 21st century. Slowly and get it right! Personal experience tells me a thing or two!

[vikpaw]

An interesting (if very pro Capita, so apologies for that) statement about the NI implementation. Paragraph 4 is the interesting part (Just ignore the marketing drivel from @PhilNeal ):

 

Capita to supply SIMS to 1200 schools in Northern Ireland for next 5 years | capita-sims.co.uk

 

So an early indication for SIMS 8, or a roll out of something everyone is jumping on the band wagon with recently, this being a fully featured multi-supplier environment with all resources to hand? Granted this is from 2012, so these boys were there first, but is nonetheless identical to what SWGfL have recently announced and others...

 

It doesn't really say much though does it? Just playing devil's advocate - it could mean linking school based SIMS.Net via partnership Xchange into the cloud so data is shared but still no cloud MIS. However, the groundwork is there in a nice controlled environment to test out what is possible.

 

I didn't actually get a lot of detail from anyone apart from it exists and is happening - what form it is taking is still a bit 'cloudy'

 

I'd like to see what they are using in schools right now.

[GREED]

Paragraph 4 talks about a 'brand new' self contained cloud environment where all your resources are to hand. That say a little bit!

 

Yes I agree it isn't Sims 8 and doesn't reveal much... maybe one of our favorite Capita people would like to elaborate...

[BKGarry]

Our LEA offers "cloud based" SIMS through our Broadband connection straight to their data centre, seems to run through Remote App or something. Always kinda tempted me, but I like having my own server, and with things like InTouch and Bromcomm MCAS/TWF running on it as a service, it is still best kept in house at the moment.

[GREED]

Good use of the quotations.. Cloud?

 

So do you think that will change when cloudy Sims comes along?

Edited February 12, 2014 by GREED

[vikpaw]

Literally!

[GREED]

Literally!

 

You see I don't even have to try anymore!

[BKGarry]

Well technically you can call your server farm a private cloud, I used the quoted to make a point that is not strictly a public cloud, to use it from home you need to use Juniper VPN (supplied by the LEA with the broadband contract), so not strictly a full cloud service but is.

 

Did i make sense there?

[GREED]

You did I was being flippant! Apologies.

 

It is the term cloud that is so interchangeable these days when people really mean 'I can access it through a browser and it is on a server that isn't in my building'. And I'm not suggesting you are at all. It is a long standing bugbear of mine, especially when a product being in the cloud is compared to Amazon servers or the best one was 'in the same way Google is in the cloud'... right so you have circulated clustered replicated servers in disparate locations around the country/world...

 

Awaits abuse...

[CAM]

Just to be crystal clear - we will not be releasing the NI product in the rest of the UK for quite some time.

 

Maybe instead of SIMS.net...it is SIMS.ie?

 

SIMS.ie

.ie

IE

 

Browser-based?

[PhillipHamlyn]

pete,

 

As you can understand, I can't comment or disclose a great deal of technical information about our future product ranges, not least of which because technology is a very moveable feast, but our initial version approaching initial release in Northern Ireland do include Silverlight components but by the time it is on general release it will include no plugins or proprietary client technology and will work on an HTML compliant browser.

 

I have a question for the community - what percentage of your schools use or are planning to use Office 365 or Google Apps (with associated Drive and SkyDrive document storage) for their main line-of-business office automation ? As technical people, what is your feeling for the level of adoption these platforms will eventually reach within schools, and are these mainly driven by license cost, operating simplicity, total-cost-of-ownership, or reach across devices ?

[vikpaw]

We don't use O365 widely due to technical issues / connectivity issues, but i can see it growing massively.

Google apps are also really big internationally so that too is going to keep growing.

 

It's new stuff now, but it will become the norm in a very little time.

[zag]

It would be great if any new web based version of Sims was:

 

Browser Independent

Work on Tablets just as well as desktops

Simpler to use (We don't need every feature from Sims desktop transferred)

Technology Interdependent (no silverlight, flash ect)

Fast to use

Cloud based centrally on fast servers (SLG was over complicated because they allowed a local install)

Reports work without the need for Microsoft office

[zag]

We use Office 365 and I imagine every other school in the country Office 365 or Googles version in the next few years. Edited February 12, 2014 by zag

[PhillipHamlyn]

zag,

 

Thanks for those suggestions. It is our intention to make it fully HTML compliant but we need to bear in mind that the user interface that works well on a desktop or laptop does not always translate well onto a finger-driven device. We've seen how Microsoft tried to force desktop users to use an interface designed for touch users in their Metro application design, so we are cognisant of the different needs of different sets of users, using different devices. Technically any HTML based client will work on a tablet, phone, and big screen mouse driven desktop; but they might be very different experiences to make best use of those devices; however I was personally stunned (in a positive way) to see customers using SIMS.net on Terminal Services on an iPad recently, so our basic thrust is to make sure primarily that it does work, and tailor the UX as needed for those devices.

[PhillipHamlyn]

vikpaw,

 

I'm interested in what connectivity issues you experience with O365 - would they be the same for any "cloud" based system ?

[tombry]

we use 365 for email, but all staff have office 2010 (soon 2013 I suspect) on their computers.

 

personally I'd love to move to GAPPS, but I don't think our head of I.T. would be down for that, especially as some of us use Excel at a decently high level.

 

but I'd love to move to chromebooks and gapps for our students/staff.

[zag]

zag,

 

Thanks for those suggestions. It is our intention to make it fully HTML compliant but we need to bear in mind that the user interface that works well on a desktop or laptop does not always translate well onto a finger-driven device. We've seen how Microsoft tried to force desktop users to use an interface designed for touch users in their Metro application design, so we are cognisant of the different needs of different sets of users, using different devices. Technically any HTML based client will work on a tablet, phone, and big screen mouse driven desktop; but they might be very different experiences to make best use of those devices; however I was personally stunned (in a positive way) to see customers using SIMS.net on Terminal Services on an iPad recently, so our basic thrust is to make sure primarily that it does work, and tailor the UX as needed for those devices.

 

Yep exactly, a lot of things that are web based need to be simplified a lot but this isn't a problem for most of us.

 

We have exactly that usage case of our teacher ipad users using remote desktop to use Sims, I try to get them to use groupcall Emerge but it doesn't do the reports side of things yet.

 

Really looking forward to what you have planned in the coming years, Sims is well due an "online" refresh

[CAM]

pete,

 

As you can understand, I can't comment or disclose a great deal of technical information about our future product ranges, not least of which because technology is a very moveable feast, but our initial version approaching initial release in Northern Ireland do include Silverlight components but by the time it is on general release it will include no plugins or proprietary client technology and will work on an HTML compliant browser.

 

I have a question for the community - what percentage of your schools use or are planning to use Office 365 or Google Apps (with associated Drive and SkyDrive document storage) for their main line-of-business office automation ? As technical people, what is your feeling for the level of adoption these platforms will eventually reach within schools, and are these mainly driven by license cost, operating simplicity, total-cost-of-ownership, or reach across devices ?

 

I can't see Office being removed from schools whilst SIMS requires it. Having Google Docs or SkyDrive would be great, but SIMS would refuse to work without Office as it needs VBA to operate. Before a new SIMS could adopt the Google Apps / SkyDrive platform it would need to sever the reliance on one vendor and move to a more open document format. This in turn could pave the way for cross-platform support and bring us closer to having a choice in what platform we use in schools.

[PhillipHamlyn]

CAM,

 

Document Composition (i.e. generating docs) will be done within the cloud in a browser based SIMS but at present we do not know which is the most popular output formats - Google Docs support Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF 1.2) , Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365 also support this format, so we are likely to target the underlying common format for publications unless there is a strong feeling that there is a better option.

 

In terms of document storage once the documents have been composed in SIMS, we would expect to write them to a URL based destination - and we will include a basic document repository in a future SIMS just like we do in SIMS.net - the question is whether O365/GDocs will attain sufficient penetration into schools for us to consider making that document repository a user option - i.e. that they will likely already have their own O365/GDocs repository ?

[zag]

CAM,

 

Document Composition (i.e. generating docs) will be done within the cloud in a browser based SIMS but at present we do not know which is the most popular output formats - Google Docs support Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF 1.2) , Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365 also support this format, so we are likely to target the underlying common format for publications unless there is a strong feeling that there is a better option.

 

In terms of document storage once the documents have been composed in SIMS, we would expect to write them to a URL based destination - and we will include a basic document repository in a future SIMS just like we do in SIMS.net - the question is whether O365/GDocs will attain sufficient penetration into schools for us to consider making that document repository a user option - i.e. that they will likely already have their own O365/GDocs repository ?

 

the simple answer is yes they will. But there will always be others that could use HTML in a web browser.

[LosOjos]

Echoing what @CAM said a little, I think a major focus should be on making any new system as open as possible. This means not relying on browser plugins (which in turn could limit the end user to which browser they can use), using open document formats, ensuring cross browser compatibility.

 

When schools buy your system, their only concern should be can your system provide the features as advertised. Whether they are using MS Office or Libre Office, Windows, Linux or Mac shouldn't matter - your system should "just work" regardless.

 

It would be easy to target a Windows environment using IE with MS Office installed (as 99% of educational software today does) but that's not what's best for your customers. In terms of benefits to yourselves in developing a system as proposed above is that you can push the fact that, unlike many other MIS, yours will work in any environment. This means that if schools want to run a Linux network with Libre Office (or similar) and take advantage of the huge savings they could make, they can without concern that their MIS, one of the most important pieces of software in school, will cause them issues.

 

TL;DR - please, take this opportunity to break away from the heavy reliance on MS products that is so prevalent in education - think of the money schools could potentially save in the current financial climate

Edited February 12, 2014 by LosOjos

[PhillipHamlyn]

LosOjos,

 

In a nutshell, that is also our philosophy. In the past we have interfaced with Microsoft products simply because they were the product ranges our customers most bought and were present in their schools - but in the Cloud world customers have a larger choice of broadly comparable and compatible products, and I was trying to fish out whether the community had a opinion of whether there was a general move by schools to online-only products like O365 and Google Docs, or whether they still predominantly looked for a desktop document authoring product. It would be actually substantially more difficult for us to interface with a locally installed application than their cloudy brethern.

[vikpaw]

vikpaw,

 

I'm interested in what connectivity issues you experience with O365 - would they be the same for any "cloud" based system ?

 

Our issue is mostly internet connectivity, reliability and speed. Ideally we need a system that is co-hosted and kept in sync. We keep everything in house because if the internet goes down, we can hope that life goes on internally, though we all know without youtube there is nothing!

What would be nice is if the net does go down, the externally co-hosted system would server the external clients, be they staff, students, parents etc.

 

At the moment as school is priority, and always will be, we get more uptime by having things in house.

 

I hoped we could have O365 and sync it to onsite exchange but that proved to be too difficult to setup, if not impossible at the time we looked. Getting access to a basic sharepoint page on it was snails pace though the rest of it worked okay-ish.

 

So it would and does affect any cloud based system. My circumstances are quite unique, but the problem could well be the same for any school with poor connectivity.

 

I like local cloud. I don't need you to host it, just redesign it to work cross browser, easily. As Phil reminded me at BETT i like apps. So given a choice, i want apps apps apps, the UI is the best. By all means build it to work in a browser with a mobile view, but you can't beat a dedicated device specific app. Even microsoft now have RDP apps, so it takes advantage of the device gestures.

 

For docs, i would suggest that you need to allow for a school to do everything in house, or at least within the SIMS environment, but make it easy to port to another system, be that O365, GApps etc. So no randomly named folders full of encrypted files.

 

Actually, do this for all aspects, if you're building a whole new set of tables from the ground up, it will inherently be much cleaner and more adaptable anyway.