[sims] Academic Year start date

[howartp]

Howdy.

 

We have various systems that run daily/weekly imports, but as you will be familiar, they won't upload data for the new academic year until SIMS ticks over into the configured start date.

 

Has anyone set their academic year to start in say the last week of summer hols (with first few days set as holidays), in order to allow these new uploads to run before the first day of term?

 

Does anyone know of any legal/academic/educational reasons why this shouldn't be done?

 

Peter

[DrCheese]

Would like to know the same, it's maddening not being able to run most of our processes until 12am that night

[PhilNeal]

You can set the start of term early and mark days as non-teaching. However I think most of the issues with TP products is that they link with data items that aren't available until children are admitted and/or have UPNs.

[howartp]

TP products?

 

Our new year 7 students are admitted mid hols and have UPNs, and are assigned classes - they just don't appear in those classes etc until academic year starts.

 

If we can set term to start 1 week early we've time to sort the sync's out.

[PhilNeal]

TP = Third Party (sorry for terminology)

Admitting pupils before they have arrived isn't really how the "system" works - AdNos should only be issued to pupils that turn up. There is absolutely no reason that a third party can't see all of the classes in advance of their start date.

[mukz]

TP products?

 

Our new year 7 students are admitted mid hols and have UPNs, and are assigned classes - they just don't appear in those classes etc until academic year starts.

 

If we can set term to start 1 week early we've time to sort the sync's out.

 

Hi Howartp,

 

We use majority of the major SIMs partner products out there and all can look to the future, majority of the tome it isn't setup initially and needs to be requested through the third party product support.

(Majority use groupcall to extract data anyway)

 

Mukesh

[howartp]

All CAN be set to look to the future, yes. Try telling your SIMS partners that.

 

Groupcall are refusing to, so to get live data to test a new product with this summer, I've had to clone my SIMS server, turn off the old one and set the date forward to September, run the extract, then turn off the clone and turn on the live server, every other day through the holidays.

 

Microlibrarian (Eclipse) also use Groupcall and they don't accept any pre-admission data so I can't import anything until start of term.

 

ParentPay don't use Groupcall; they do see pre-admission data, but the students' year and form don't import until the start of term so our activation letters are blank.

 

So unless PhilNeal can pursuade Groupcall that there is a valid use case for wanting future data, my query in this thread still stands.

 

(Oh, add SAM Learning to that list of feeds that don't take data until term time)

Edited September 9, 2016 by howartp

[howartp]

@PhilNeal - any thoughts on the above?

 

Should GroupCall be using future data? (I know the answer to that, but they are refusing - do Capita have conversations with their partners about using features?)

 

Peter

[PhilNeal]

Peter we do have discussions with partners about their requirements. I'm surprised that @GREED hasn't picked up on this thread - I'll alert him to it.

[GREED]

Thanks for the alert @PhilNeal

 

To all

 

Admittedly I do not get involved in the Xporter side of things much, I am the product manager for the purchasable products for schools, I can find out what is the score here. I would be interested to know more about conversations where we have refused x y and z. If anyone has details of this please email me at [email protected] and I will look into urgently.

 

Fundamentally, Xporter (if anyone doesn't know, this is what the third parties use to get the data from SIMS) is liaised with via the third party themselves, and so if there are requests for different data requirements, this needs to come direct from the TP. If said third parties are saying we have refused to do x y and z, then again I would like to hear more about this so I can close the loop and ensure that these conversations are indeed taking place, and I can ensure that appropriate weight is given to those with evidence that a requirements from schools is indeed there!

 

Without second guessing, it 'could' be that because this is a once a year occurrence that may not have huge weight in requirements discussions, but that does not make your requests any less valid. Please do get in touch with any details you have and in parallel I will speak with the Xporter PM and find out what is going on from that side.

 

Please either PM or email, don't share details publicly just yet and getting lots of people on the defensive with each other before the reasons are known! We all know how this forum gets at times.

 

One other point, @PhilNeal is right Capita do talk with partners on a regular basis including Groupcall, they provides all the info we need and there to help if needed, even after all these years of being a partner. Getting the data out of SIMS has never really been an issue, at least for us.

Edited September 13, 2016 by GREED

[howartp]

Email sent.

[GREED]

Email received

[GREED]

I just wanted to update this thread with further words:

 

1. Absolutely we can provide a function for future dates, and have done for a small number of partners that have requested this as part of their extract. Most partners have not asked for this, but changes can be made if they get in touch.

 

2. Our partners are technically our customers, and so any work carried out is specifically asked for by them. If they do not ask for future dates, we cannot and will not include this. Best advice is to contact the partner and ask/put pressure on them to get the changes you want (which i am sure you do for everything anyway, not just data!).

 

3. While we try to work with all scenarios, if a school requests for a change to a partner's extract, we have to refuse until the partner themselves authorises it. This is for a multitude of obvious reasons, the main ones being data security and integrity, commercial concerns (someone needs to pay for the work!), how does this affect the partner system and all their customers....

 

4. We have NEVER refused to provide data to partners, with the exception that data is simply not available or accessible. Doesn't happen very often, particularly with SIMS, sometimes more so with other MIS's (i.e. when their API doesn't provide the information... not a lot we can do!), but we work as best we can on the requests of the partner. I would ask if a partner is suggesting that they cannot do x because Groupcall have refused to give them the data, to contact us or have the partner contact us immediately to resolve and find out when exactly we have refused.

 

5. @howartp thank you for sending in the email with details, and I am sure we can move forward to getting the changes applied as described in the reply.

 

Thanks all

 

Graham

Product Manager

Groupcall