Moving from SIMS to Facility/ePortal - Easy to learn?

[sjb252]

Hi all,

 

First post here so apologies if I do something wrong!

 

I'm looking at moving to a school and leading on aspects of assessment, reporting and potentially timetabling, and the school in question currently uses Facility and ePortal. Coming from a school using SIMS (7 years experience) will I have any major difficulties learning Facility quickly? There are plenty of courses listed on the Advanced Learning website, but they are based in Dublin which could cause difficulties.

 

Any particular, specific issues I may face in the transition?

 

Cheers

 

sjb252

[6Foot2]

Hello. Welcome to Edugeek.

 

We made the same MIS transition about 7 years ago. We are now looking at another change (possibly back to SIMS)

 

The move over was smooth and without incident but we did apply some pressure to the Serco rep before everything started. It is a while ago now and the fine detail is fading, but before the school signed on the dotted line we were seeking assurances on all issues that we thought were relevant:

 

Will the shared database transfer data successfully across the shared network in our Consortium?

How long will the migration take?

How much historical data will be migrated across from SIMS?

 

You know the sort of thing. If it is a concern for you highlight it so that it is a known 'issue' so that it can be addressed before or after your migration. At least that is how it worked for us.

 

Good luck.

 

[sjb252]

Thank you for the response. Apologies but I don't think I was very clear in what I was asking, I meant how will I personally cope (as an experience SIMS user) moving to a new school that uses Facility? Especially considering the fact that I'd be leading on assessment/reporting. Hope that makes more sense.

[6Foot2]

Thank you for the response. Apologies but I don't think I was very clear in what I was asking...

 

I misread your post. As justification, I can say that it was late (for me, I started early yesterday)

 

To 'reply' to your original post I am afraid that I can't be much help as I don't make much use of Facility/ePortal and didn't use SIMS much either.

 

Sorry. Good luck again.

[pcstru]

It's a while since I've had much to do with SIMS but you should be fine. Assessment products tend to be complex so rarely get the accolade of "easy to learn" but since you already have good knowledge of the domain (you know what you want it to do) and knowledge of how another product does it, you have a good head start on figuring out Facility.

[bobsmith]

I've got about 10 years experience with Facility CMIS and just over a year and a half with SIMS.

 

You'll find some fairly major differences between the two, they took some adjusting to.

 

Facility does some very clever stuff with reporting - it's mostly using a bespoke WYSIWYG interface rather than faffing around with Word. There's a whole syntax to learn but there's a lot of experienced people posting common tricks and solutions on their forums. It doesn't use aspects the same way as SIMS, results are stored against subjects rather than against standalone aspects, there are pros and cons to both methods, but you can knock out their equivalent of marksheets a lot lot faster, and reports can be faster to build, but with a little less customisability sometimes.

 

With the amount of SIMS experience you have you'll have no real issues, and learning a 2nd MIS really helps you understand what it is you're doing I've found. You become less focussed on the product and more on the methodology.

 

From a timetabling point of view I still find that Facility trumps Nova, but there are a lot less people around to ask for help. You can do very clever things with Facility timetables, not least the fact that you can make changes from within the main program itself for those niggling mid year changes.

 

If you ever do have questions I'll be happy to answer them (I still miss a lot of the things I could do in Facility)

[Banjo]

The reporting/assessment module is powerful but does have a steep learning curve. There are no wizards like SIMS when you want to work out averages or use add or subtract, it's all code, and trial and error. A basic knowledge of SQL will help as there will be times when you will need to run queries/updates on the DB to fix/amend errors with the assessment tables. From memory you could amend most of the data in the assessment tables except the actual data item that was held in the criteria field. This was is a piping format 2a|1a|3b etc and I never worked out a reliable way to bulk update this information.

 

Take a copy of the DB and restore is locally to MS Access so you can poke around and again a better understanding of its structure.