Migrating from SchoolBase to iSAMS? Free utility offered.

[jwinters]

Several people have asked me about this recently, so I might as well mention it publicly.

 

Earlier this year I was involved in migrating a school from using SchoolBase as their MIS to using iSAMS. The school is now up and running on iSAMS and are very happy with it, but the migration process was not without its pain. (I presume this would be true for any migration from A to B, regardless of which A and B are involved.)

 

To move a whole school's data into iSAMS, they expect the school to do the vast majority of the heavy lifting. The old MIS's database must be dumped, interpreted, and then all the re-formatting work needs to be done by the school ready for iSAMS to load it. Effectively you need to build their database table contents for them.

 

To achieve this I wrote a utility (about 10,000 lines of modularised code) which does the job. Having used it and now having no further need of it, the school in question have very generously agreed to put it under an Open Source licence which means it is free for anyone else to use, although obviously it carries no warranty of any kind. You will definitely need to tweak it in the fine detail to suit your particular school's needs, but it should nonetheless save you a serious amount of time. It could potentially do 90% of the work for you.

 

If you are interested, drop me a PM and I can give you access to the source.

 

Please note - this post is not intended to be seen as an endorsement of iSAMS, or of any other MIS. I don't know enough about them to be able to make any kind of informed comparison. I was not involved in this school's decision process - I was simply presented with a job, "We've decided to move all our data from SchoolBase to iSAMS. Please make it happen." So I did. Given the amount of effort involved in writing a utility to do all the necessary work, it seems a shame that it should be used only once. If its functionality happens to align with what you want to do, then I hope it will be of use.

 

Cheers,

John

Edited October 19, 2016 by jwinters

[matt40k]

Awesome - could you put the code on GitHub please? It'll make it easier to track\manage changes overtime and give a central point to download\check for updates rather then ad-hoc requests.

[jwinters]

Good idea. I'll just need to treble-check that there is no school-specific confidential information embedded in the code before I do that. I'm pretty confident there isn't, but...

[jwinters]

OK - it's there.

 

https://github.com/jhwinters/extractor

 

There is still some school-specific stuff in there, like the mapping of their pupil sanctions in SB to the corresponding areas in iSAMS, but no personal or confidential information.

 

Anyone wanting to use it will need to sort out their own mappings for, for instance, report grades, rewards and sanctions, medical conditions, etc. but the vast bulk of it should work as it stands.

[_Boo_]

Oh I could kiss you Winters! Just saw this, after spending Christmas break dreading this process. Thank you so much!

[jwinters]

Glad it's of use to someone. Feel free to PM me if you need any assistance.

 

Cheers,

John