[sims] Extracting SIMS progress data to display on Intranet

[Theldron]

Hi all,

 

As part of the intranet staff site that I am building I would like to put SIMS student progress data on there, a chart that displays which students are going to exceed expectations, meet expectations or not meet expectations in all subjects but especially the core subjects. I want this on here to be readily available to staff and immediate visual without having to trawl through SIMS.

 

I am sure people have done something like this before, can anyone give me any advice or any how to's?

 

Would be extremely grateful.

 

Many thanks

[jb2201]

It would require either some sort of Groupcall Xporter job to export the data and build a chart from the XML. Other option is direct access to the SIMS SQL server, but this requires considerable knowledge of the table structure in SIMS (its massive) and would also invalidate your SIMS warranty.

[vikpaw]

Have you used Discover? - it's a free built-in visualization tool. Once set up, you should be able to push the info to staff, and maybe even use it as the basis for an export to pull in elsewhere.

 

Failing that you'll want to export marksheet data - ideally analysed, or write a report to export it, but then you'll have to analyse it after it's exported.

[SteveM555]

You could run a nightly report and schedule it using SIMS CommandReporter to automate the process. You would have to do all the analysis yourself and the generation of the visuals.

[PhilNeal]

You do have to set up your progress grids, targets etc. in SIMS but if you have you can get to a complete pupil teacher view with all of that information on it within about two clicks. Quick search->Pupil/Teacher view.

 

If you want the info for your classes - click on the class on the homepage timetable; if progress grids have been produced for the class they are on a tab.

[CAM]

@PhilNeal Do you have a guide for Progress Grids? They sound quite useful!

[LosOjos]

You could run a nightly report and schedule it using SIMS CommandReporter to automate the process. You would have to do all the analysis yourself and the generation of the visuals.

 

This is how I do it. There's a script scheduled to run on my intranet server which runs a SIMS report via CommandReporter and saves the output as XML, then runs an SQL Server script to import that data in to my own SQL Server DB (makes dealing with the data easier in your ASP.NET, you could equally use MySQL if you were going to use PHP/Ruby for instance).

 

I'd seriously advise against accessing SIMS' SQL DB directly - if you accidentally mess something up, you won't be covered by standard support and the ad-hoc support provided by Capita to resolve your issues is likely to cost your school a hell of a lot of money. Aside from that, it's not a nicely structured DB to begin with and [apparently] changes regularly. Much better IMO to use CommandReporter, which is supported by Capita, and used SIMS' standard reporting engine to ensure your reports will continue to work between updates. Of course this will mean your data won't exactly be live, but you could schedule the report to run hourly if you like (I find nightly is adequate)

[vikpaw]

@PhilNeal Do you have a guide for Progress Grids? They sound quite useful!

Try resource #21889

[Steven_Cleaver]

Do Class Tracking in SIM's and Do similar to @Lojos and @SteveM555 Reports via CommandReporter then into own SQL Database then Web front end to do analysis, works pretty well but has took sometime to set up and do it like this as we wanted some bespoke analysis and easy access for all staff and produce some bespoke reports to save staff time, to be honest can do a far bit in SIM's on its own and Discover which we looked at but we wanted some very specific information and Reports and to make these very easily accessible to everyone. We are sort of looking at linking this into Insight our Parental Portal which to be honest I have already done as a test and was pretty easy just need to make our Web Analysis Server use SSL.

 

So would probably look at @PhilNeal methods first with Discover and see if that can get you what you want.

[PhilNeal]

@CAM hopefully @vikpaw's reference will assist. There are lots of prepared grids available. If you have defined your own Aspects but want to utilise our resources there is a mapping tool available.