[tribal] New Tribal MIS

[hindertonhead]

Hi

We are considering a move away from SIMS to a new product from TRIBAL called Synergy For Schools.

Does anyone have any experience of working with this company?

 

Also we use Google Apps for Education and want to sync our systems with the ical calendar format, anyone know anything about doing this with any other MIS products?

 

cheers

 

Liam

[GREED]

Only know 'of' them so far. Tribal are big in the FE sector and I know they are brining their MIS to the state market now. Think they only have a couple of schools currently.

 

I can't help you (yet) on the Google Apps part... but watch this space.

[hindertonhead]

Thats fine- I know they are launching it as a brand new product, we are exploring other options but integration with Google calendar is essential for us.

[GREED]

Well do let us know what you find out, we are building a repository of MIS information and things like this will be very useful!

[vikpaw]

@hindertonhead - great to have you here.

it's the second time i've been impressed with info on an MIS site Tribal - Helping you understand the IMLS Framework

i guess i should visit more regularly.

 

No idea of anyone that uses them, but if you speak to them, please share what you find so we can help others.

[kctesting]

Hi,

 

I would stay away from Tribal, they live in the past and way too expensive for what they offer.

Not using Synergy so cannot comment on that, but using a more "advanced" MIS system like EBS...the company itself has a bad reputation Support!...there are actually unofficial forums to help users with their issues!

[hindertonhead]

Hi- Thanks for that response. We are still weighing up our options. The SIMS Learning Gateway seems to offer some of the web based functionality we are looking for and would be a bolt on to the existing MIS> Does anyone use this?

[teejay]

Hi- Thanks for that response. We are still weighing up our options. The SIMS Learning Gateway seems to offer some of the web based functionality we are looking for and would be a bolt on to the existing MIS> Does anyone use this?

 

We tried SIMS Learning Gateway and it was a complete failure,if you have SIMS then look at the products by companies such as TASC and Groupcall, much better products.

[hindertonhead]

Thats interesting, I have just investigated the TASC product and it seems to have better feedback from users on this site. cheers

[heronius]

We are using Synergy by Tribal at Devon Studio School.

 

Devon Studio School

 

Having used PPMS in Scotland and SIMs at a school in Newton Abbot I can't find fault with:

 

The product

The support

The bespoke package created by the Tribal development team

The 'usability' for my staff

The price

 

We needed a cloud based system and I wanted my staff to be able to take registers and complete admin tasks on smart phones.

 

The behavoiur module was set up, with help from the tribal development team, as the process that I wanted to have in a school since I started teaching 17 years ago.

 

I'm not on the pay roll by the way!

 

(I did look at all the 'big players' last summer in our set up phase and was very unimpressed by their tacit expectation that I would 'go with' them).

 

Happy to answer specific questions about set up, day to day running and functionality from my own perspective.

 

Kind regards

 

 

Stuart.

[hindertonhead]

Hi, yes will take you up on that offer! Interesting to hear from a school actually using the system. Our position is that we are comparing the costs of several add on systems to give web based access to the current MIS that will cost us additional subscriptions to systems such as TASC, compared with a complete move to TRIBAL with all of this functionality included. The cost of TRIBAL at this stage is higher, with some functionality that we want still not available, so it may be something for us in the future. cheers Liam ( email address removed by moderators. Please PM) Edited April 18, 2014 by elsiegee40
Email address removed

[Asgard]

Another EBS user

 

We have used the support quite a lot, something seems to break at every upgrade... But i have nothing but good thing to say about their support team.

 

Negatives (due to be resolved in EBS 4.20)

 

Can't take registers our touchscreen monitors in classrooms unless you pull the USB because it crashes the register page because it's not touch aware.

 

We can't roll out Win8 because we have to wait for the next version that removes the reliance on .NET4.0...

[nharvatt]

It’s concerning to hear that you’ve had a negative experience of Tribal, and we’d like to try to address whatever issues you’ve got. If we’ve made a mistake of some kind, we’d like to put it right. We’re very proud of the fact that more UK universities, colleges and training providers trust us with their MIS systems than any other provider, and the vast majority of our customers are delighted with the work we do for them. But in this case, we’ve clearly got something wrong. Please can you provide contact details, or make contact with me, and I’ll do everything I can to help.

[GREED]

But not schools... perhaps you have made the point for many right there. Schools are very different to other sectors.

[kctesting]

Do you have any data to support your claim?

 

"...and the vast majority of our customers are delighted with the work we do for them"

 

You either read the wrong feedback data or maybe you are presented only with good and positive ones.

[nharvatt]

But not schools... perhaps you have made the point for many right there. Schools are very different to other sectors.

 

Thanks Greed. We understand that schools are very different to other sectors and the response of heronius demonstrates that we providing good levels of support for our schools customers. In APAC we support c.2000 schools, yes they have different geographic requirements however they operate in a very similar way to UK schools so the majority of their needs are common.

 

Whilst each sector has its owns needs we do understand how to provide excellent customer service for all our customers. That’s why we are concerned to read posts of customers having a negative experience, we clearly got something wrong and want to understand what we can do to help put it right.

[nharvatt]

Do you have any data to support your claim?

 

"...and the vast majority of our customers are delighted with the work we do for them"

 

You either read the wrong feedback data or maybe you are presented only with good and positive ones.

 

Hi kctesting

 

Perhaps you can send me a PM so we can continue this discussion outside of this thread and ensure it stays on topic for hindertonhead and others that might read it. We would like to understand what we can do to help put right whatever it is we got wrong.

[mikecampbell]

To any users of Tribal MIS products, I'd be interested to know how well/easily these products integrate with third-party software that require access to MIS data.

[Ellie04]

Hi, I'm interested in this thread as we are in the same situation as the initial poster, in that we use google apps and are looking for a cloud based MIS. One of my concerns is the lack of integration at the moment with third party apps but Tribal did say they are building a JSON REST API which looks promising if the timeframe is within reason.

[kctesting]

@ nharvatt

 

The discussion is relevant, topic is about Tribal: How is Tribal as a company and their products...etc.

Is not on my agenda to say bad things about Tribal believe me, I was just expressing my opinion, there are technical facts on how bad is designed and implemented in some areas; if you still think that Tribal is so great all you have to do is to subscribe to some JISC MIS mailing lists or truly speak with customers.

I hope you understand I'm not referring to any specific support case, just as a whole.

 

@ mikecampbell

 

Not a great choice for third party software, most of the work is custom; it is SQL or Oracle backend so you can do most of the stuff you need but as I said, mainly custom.

[John3085]

Not a great choice for third party software, most of the work is custom; it is SQL or Oracle backend so you can do most of the stuff you need but as I said, mainly custom.

 

Quick observation about custom database work with Tribal: I have found most of EBS's database to be fairly straightforward to work with, with the exception of the timetabling / attendance system, which is Byzantian in complexity! I emailed the helpdesk asking how to get a simple query that would give us:

 

Student name & Id, date & time, room, teacher, course, class, attendance mark

 

Basic stuff for an attendance system, you would think? Something we could then refine to get the specific data we need. I was told that work would require a (paid) consultant!

 

I was not impressed.

[Asgard]

This was the mood in my department today when our most recent EBS issues were fixed.