What Is SIMS Discover?

[pastymaster]

Hi all,

 

I've been asked to look into running SIMS Discover as it should make the life of our Exams Officer a little easier. I've had a very quick look around but can't find exactly what it does.

 

So, what does it do?

 

Do any of you run it successfully in your schools? Are there any major advantages and disadvantages to running it?

 

I have received some of the hardware requirements that state user workstations are recommended to have dedicated graphics! Is this really the case or do you run it without?

 

Thanks in advance.

[creese]

Discover is Capita SIMS Graphical Reporting tool. It will synch SIMS data overnight then you can drag & drop parts or whole charts. Drag data from a number of charts and create Venn diagrams. Copy the charts into word etc. also create discover groups and dynamic groups.

[LosOjos]

Dynamic Groups alone are worth installing Discover for IMO - ought to be built right in to SIMS really!

 

Not much to add that @creese hasn't already said. I went on a "refresher" course a few weeks ago as I hadn't seen Discover since it's initial, slightly disappointing release - the latest version is miles better than the first version I saw! I plan to put it to better use next year.

 

SIMS Discover for secondary schools and academies | capita-sims.co.uk

[creese]

Not much to add that @creese hasn't already said. I went on a "refresher" course a few weeks ago as I hadn't seen Discover since it's initial, slightly disappointing release - the latest version is miles better than the first version I saw! I plan to put it to better use next year.

 

Discover was introduced by accident, as it was built to demonstrate the data that SIMS held, at BETT. It looked so good that customer demand meant it was released to schools, so probably not as good as it could be early on. That is my understanding anyway.

[pastymaster]

Thanks for the help.

 

Do you both find that it needs to run on workstations with dedicated graphics?

 

I'm just a bit sceptical that it's needed as surely it's only accessing the same data and displaying it in a different way. We also use PARS so I'm not sure if this is just going to duplicate some of the things you can do in that really, just with added fancy graphs

 

If it helps people then it's certainly got to be worth looking into though I suppose.

[creese]

Sorry, meant to comment on that. Our training room has some pretty basic IT, I also have it on a Tosh. Sat. C850 if that helps.

 

It is free so it's only going to cost you time to set up.

[zag]

Thanks for the help.

Do you both find that it needs to run on workstations with dedicated graphics?

 

No you don't need dedicated graphics, it runs fine on a normal i3

[LosOjos]

I'm afraid I've not tried it on a machine without a discrete GPU... I'd imagine any of the newer CPUs with APU/iGPU would be fine too.

 

As @creese said, the software is free so just give it a go!

[Boredguy]

We tried it on our workstations with onboard GPU and it was too sluggish, so we had to purchase dedicated small form factor graphic's cards for the dozen stations we wanted it installed onto.

 

I think I can count on 1 hand the number of people that actually use it since we installed it last year.

[pastymaster]

That's spot on. Thank you all for the responses.

 

I'll try and have a look at it over the coming week and see where I get up to.

 

Thanks again.

[vikpaw]

It was more aimed at being used by certain key users, data managers, senior management and such like. From what i remember the required spec' was very high, but then in practise people found sometimes it worked fine and other times, they had to order a new machine.

Before you spend too much time on it, it's worth finding out exactly what the Exams Officer needs, and what they hope to get out of it, lest their hopes get set too high.

[creese]

It took me about 20 minutes to install on a laptop (as a server). It's not going to be the end of the world if they don't use it much. I'm sure someone will.

[tombry]

I use it quite a bit, and have built some pretty decent trend graphs with it for SLT, I've shown others how to use it, but I don't think anyone but myself and my compadre data man use it regularly.

 

my AIO uses it for the dynamic groups, and my Head of Sixth uses it to track her students though.

[pastymaster]

Thanks again everyone for the help, I thought I'd update as I've not logged in for a while (was it really May when I asked this!?!)

 

The school actually went down the route of purchasing the SISRA system instead of SIMS Discover. I've not heard any feedback from the system but fingers crossed it'll work out for the users.