SimonCygnetIT Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 Hi all Is there anyone out there who is actually using Hosted SIMS? If so what are your experiences and how do you find it cost wise compared to having a server at school site running SIMS and all that entails running it. Kind regards Simon
geekgirl Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 (edited) Do not go with Hosted SIMS! Everything is bad about hosted. Here is some bad past experiences I've had: Sometimes they don't do the update at all. We waited and waited for the latest upgrade to be deployed but they didn't do it. Several months later if they actually do the update they will do it automatically so they do not notify you that they are going to do it - it will roll out the update to staff machines at really inconvenient times. I had the head of Year 11 inputting some quite important assessment grades for the whole year to meet a deadline when they rolled out the upgrade, it kicked them out of sims and upgraded. Something then went wrong with the upgrade on his machine so we got an earful from them. We didn't know they had rolled it out until we called them to log the case as we thought it was a one off. It hadn't saved any of the grades which added more aggro. If you have a report with your own Macros it launches the reports in to a hosted Word in the browser which doesn't allow you to change settings to run Macros. Also pivot tables don't work on the hosted Word/Excel. First 50 users are free but after that you have to pay for £70 per new user, you have to have one contact on site to request the new users but if that person is on holiday no one else can request a new user until they are back and you are paying £70 for someone to go into System Manager, add a new user and assign permissions which means 40 seconds of work = £70. The support service isn't great either, the main service desk don't have the permission to resolve hosted tickets, they have be escalated by email to the "Hosted Team" who take their sweet time getting back to you about it. InTouch sometimes just crashes for no reason and some days it doesn't work at all. Most free schools went over to hosted to "save costs" regretted the change as the service was awful and cost them more. Hope that helps! Edited July 1, 2015 by geekgirl 2
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