[sims] Creating E-Mail Groups from SIMS

[Sam_Brown]

Morning Guys,

 

Anyone know of an easy way to create E-Mail Groups based on SIMS Groups? We have some teachers that would like to e-mail the students in their groups but obviously we don't want to create E-Mail Groups by hand on the scale they are asking for?

 

I've heard about SalamanderSoft but no idea how much it costs and would like to keep the price as close to free as possible!

 

Any tips?

[matt40k]

SalamanderSoft would be the ideal solution, that'll basically sync the two systems. Poor man's approach would be add the students email addresses into SIMS .net then create class lists with student email addresses then somehow turn that into something that can be imported into your email system to create distribution lists.

 

You can use my tool to get the students email address into SIMS if they're not already - SIMS Bulk Import - Home - I'm sure someone can help you with the other bits if you say what email system your using.

[Ecclesbury]

@matt40k how on earth did I not know about your tool? My finger is clearly off the pulse. That is amazing!

[pcstru]

Anyone know of an easy way to create E-Mail Groups based on SIMS Groups? We have some teachers that would like to e-mail the students in their groups but obviously we don't want to create E-Mail Groups by hand on the scale they are asking for?

 

Export the data into a CSV file and then use a powershell script to create the groups. I'd guess you can even automate this using the command line reporting stuff.

 

I do have some example code for the powershell side ... somewhere.

[pcstru]

Thread with some example code.

[vikpaw]

Salamander is cool and for a modest fee can include lots of different functions, e.g. auto create your users into AD, assign folders, and email, create groups based on their classes etc. So it's not just one thing you're getting. If you don't want to pay then you can do as suggested:

 

Get a report by class and show email for students in it.

Then you need a macro to yank them out and dump to Outlook, assuming you use outlook, otherwise this won't work.

 

The benefit of doing it this way is if the class membership changes, your report still works, whereas groups need maintenance.

 

I did this for teachers, but it could be easily modified for students.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/108166-plugin-software-email-all-teachers-specific-student.html#post929690

[tombry]

As we use schoolcomms, I'm trying to get SLT to approve importing the student's email addy's in, and then I'd send them to the students through there - if you have their addys in already, have a look at schoolcomms for doing this. (and if you have schoolcomms already, you're all set)

[vikpaw]

I didn't think Schoolcomms pulls in teaching groups. It does many other standard ones though. Or have I just not looked far enough down the list....?

The problem is we wouldn't want to give lots of staff access to bulk mailing all parents.

[tombry]

@vikpaw - pulls in class and course groups.

[vikpaw]

@vikpaw - pulls in class and course groups.

Not for me the closest is the curriculum groups which show the bands, but no setted class groups.

You must have the Super-edition.

[tombry]

I have the desktop version 9.0s (the latest beta for testing the online reporting), been a while since I used the groups tab on the web version, but I'd imagine they are there too - maybe it's part of my import?

[vikpaw]

Same version - Auto Schedule is working a treat - but i had to change the local connect.ini to UNC instead of mapped drive. Anyhoo, shouldn't fork this thread too much.

[SouthCoastSaint]

Vik, I think the classes import if you tell it to in your import settings (although it was years ago we did ours). Def all classes should show, plus UDGs and Discover groups too.

[Schoolcomms_Support]

Hi Vik

 

You should be able to bring these groups across into Schoolcomms by changing your import settings to include 'All groups' instead of only 'Active groups'.

 

There's a bit of a grey area in terms of what is classed as an active group in SIMS but we have found that by changing this setting, schools who have seen a similar issue to yourself are able to import any missing groups.

 

If this doesn't resolve your issue then please do get in touch with our support team directly.

[vikpaw]

Ah yeah, that's what Madeline said, but i've not tested it. Not something we want, it's just the meaning of 'active' as you say is a bit confusing.