[sims] How do you let staff and students know about room changes?

[pete]

How do you communicate room changes to staff and students in a timely (and ideally paper-free) manner?

 

 

We're currently still using paper, which is annoying for our admin ladies when someone wanders in with a last-minute change request. Form tutors then skim through the list of changes and announce the relevant ones to their form at registration.

 

SIMS Cover can spit out a simple html daily room changes report which I could then push to Xibo/homepages/email(as a PDF ideally)/maybe school bulletins in SIMS. Ideally, I'd schedule the report, spit it out to somewhere overwriting the previous report and then have a webserver scoop it up and display it on Xibo/homepages....

 

But I'm not entirely sure that SIMS will let me (via CommandReporter or other method) schedule the Cover reports.

[Boredguy]

SIMS Cover which displays on a webpage on the intranet, and it goes in the student bulletin which is e-mailed to tutors each afternoon ready for morning registration.

[Steve21]

Admin staff produce Word Document pretty tables etc and send them around, from before my time.

 

Student wise, it's normally a note on door. (But most the students are collected by teacher and moved)

 

Steve

[bobsmith]

Is scheduling going to do the trick as you said there may be a last minute change request?

 

You could of course have the admin staff run the report to output the file to a folder which your webserver can grab it from. There has been some nice vbscript posted on here recently which allows you to run a report from command reporter as needed. I've tested it and it works as advertised.

 

In my previous work place we published the daily cover via a webpage and sent an email using vb to do the same thing (using a different MIS). As long as the appropriate people have a shortcut to the script it wasn't too hard to train them to double click it every time they made a change that needed publishing.

[pete]

^ My plan was to run the schedule at 6pm and then 08:45 on the day.

 

That should capture most of the scheduled room changes and the "Jenkins has broken his leg overnight" changes before morning registration.

 

@Boredguy

 

How automated is that?

[pete]

Poking around a bit more, what I'm after is automating the "Notice Board Summary" with "Arrangement Types" set to "Rooms", but that's only available via the print dialogue and spits out to local temp files.

 

The "HTML" option spits out absences and room changes to the c7data folder on the SIMS share, which is good, but I'd really like just the room changes.

[bobsmith]

if you can find a report in the reports folder you can call it via command reporter, don't know about pre-built reports like the cover notice board summary.

[SovietRussia]

We have looked at getting cover out automatically and found that no report has the scope to view it.