MIS Providers

[Lelly]

Looking for honest appraisals please.

 

We are a large secondary school who have been using CMIS for 12 years (feels like a lifetime).

 

I have been disheartened with the service we have been receiving for the last couple of years, and am looking to transfer to an alternative MIS.

 

I would really like to know peoples HONEST opinion about the service from suppliers as well as the product they use.

 

We are currently looking at SIMS and some members of the SLT have been wowed by their Discovery Tool, does it really work as well as it seems to?

How well does the learning Gateway work?

Are there any huge downsides?

 

Thoughts?

[pcstru]

We undertook quite a long MIS evaluation process when Serco started talking about killing CMIS and ePortal. We attempted to identify our requirements of a system (without reference to any specific system) and invited a number of suppliers to provide written responses and then short-listed those that scored highest. We then looked in detail at those shortlisted, Capita's SIMS, AL's Progresso and Bromcom's MIS. The whole selection process was user driven - which hopefully means they have a strong sense of ownership and responsibility when it comes to making the selected product actually work. The clear, unanimous choice of the users in the end was Bromcom's MIS product. We are currently working on the data migration and plan to go live at the end of this academic year.

 

So far I've been reasonably impressed with their service and support. They are very diligent in ticketing issues and service requests. They are proactive in their communications. The product itself is nicely designed and easy to use - mostly all from a browser (complex analysis is likely to still need the power of excel). Bearing in mind we are not live yet, but the signs so far are good and feedback from Data Managers in other schools who have gone down the same path is generally very positive.

 

I think if you just jump to SIMS without taking the opportunity to carefully consider what your needs actually are and evaluating products against those needs, then you will be missing an opportunity. SIMS seem a bit like IBM were in past when the saying was : "no one ever got fired for buying IBM".

[pete]

We are currently looking at SIMS and some members of the SLT have been wowed by their Discovery Tool, does it really work as well as it seems to?

How well does the learning Gateway work?

Are there any huge downsides?

 

Discover isn't bad (we have a couple of people here who use it a lot) and it lets you manipulate data in a way that's tricky or impossible in SIMS .Net. It also lets you feed those groups back into SIMS for reuse and those group memberships are updated when the dependent circumstances change. In that sense they're more useful than user-defined groups in SIMS (which need manually updating).

 

If you're looking to either a) show whizzy graphical representations of $foo at meetings or B) want some more flexibility in "let me graph illness against travelling to school by bicycle" etc, it's handy.

 

But it shouldn't be a significant factor in your decision making process.

 

Our lot are looking at SISRA now because even with Discover there's still a large of amount of spreadsheet work needed (though to be fair, I think the DH in question just really likes spreadsheets).

 

Learning Gateway.

 

We had Hosted Learning Gateway. We stopped using it because we had no way of telling whether parents were using it (no usage metrics, no way of demonstrating ROI), despite nagging Capita a lot. It behaved as well as you'd expected a hosted Sharepoint install to do. Parental feedback about it was pretty bland. Contrast that with InTouch (we're actively pushing data* via text message or email to parents) that parents have responded positively to.

 

*non-confidential

[Pompey81]

We use Sims for the database but use Pars and Insight by Tasc software for all behaviour/timetables/attendance and parent portal.

[penfold_99]

Have a look at vsware. They have a very straight forward migration from cmis.

[GREED]

There are some really great offerings out there right now, I was fortunate to have a look at all of them in some detail at BETT as part of my continuing research (Not allowed to direct there myself, but check out the web address in my sig )

 

I think, and have always said, the MIS is and should be the central hub and act as the glue for the data systems you use, as well as take care of the run of the meal tasks (taking attendance, creating the timetable). But don't limit the scope to just MIS product, but look separately at the specialist products that deal with the clever or technical things, like Assessment analysis, payment systems. There are companies out there specialising in those things, and will do them much better than an MIS will, usually.

 

But to the subject of MIS products, check out the competition and take a serious look as some of the newer offers such as Arbor, VS Ware, ScholarPack (if a primary school). Progresso has a brand new analytics engine too (I'm due to review and write about next month).

 

Bottom line, unless you go with the pack and stick with older, yet dependable tech (Capita), then there is huge choice. Of course, that comes with risk, as does any MIS move.