[sims] InTouch slowness

[mrbios]

First off, what alternatives are there to InTouch (but not parentmail)?

 

As for the slowness issue, this is frustrating...i think due to the sheer quantity of people they're trying to send to, there isn't going to any simple solution here. They want to be able to send an email to every parent in sims in one go, this appears to be in the thousands, and when they click the box to select all linked adults it takes 10-15 minutes to respond. From a performance perspective i've watched the resource usage on the local PC, the sims server and on the SAN that the servers OS and Data disks run off, but there's not so much as a spike anywhere to be seen.

 

Any suggestions?

 

At the moment sending an email to everyone is done year by year, however that still takes 10 minutes to accomplish and means that some parents receive the same email twice or three times depending on how many kids they have in different years.

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

Is it a personalised email for the parent or just a generic mail shot? SIMS 7 is quite bad at building lists like that because of the .net libraries it uses and the way they are used (i.e. some of them fetch each record with an individual SQL select query while going round a loop until it has them all).

[SouthCoastSaint]

We use Schoolcomms and have 1700 students, about 2700 parents. A whole school email would take about 15 seconds to leave your screen, although obviously parents receiving them takes a little longer. If I send timetables or inividual reports to all, that would take processing time but I would say less than 10 minutes. Sending year by year not an ideal workaround as you say, parents with three children in school then get 3 emails which is irritating for them.

[mrbios]

We use Schoolcomms and have 1700 students, about 2700 parents. A whole school email would take about 15 seconds to leave your screen, although obviously parents receiving them takes a little longer. If I send timetables or inividual reports to all, that would take processing time but I would say less than 10 minutes. Sending year by year not an ideal workaround as you say, parents with three children in school then get 3 emails which is irritating for them.

 

In terms of the amount of time it takes to open school comms, select every parent and send it, how long does this take overall? Obviously excluding the amount of time it takes to actually write the email.

 

The biggest issue we're seeing with InTouch isn't so much the sending, it's opening up InTouch and selecting the sheer quantity of people you want it to go to, which is easily 10 minutes or more. Does schoolcomms pull the data from sims and store it in their system to generate the information needed? rather than pulling direct from the database upon request which is presumably what InTouch does?

[SouthCoastSaint]

I have SC open on my desktop - but login is a matter of seconds. To send to whole school, I click To Parents Of, then the list appears of every class, group and individual child in Sims, I click Year 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 to select them (instantly move to the recipients box) and Ok. (I normally do updates as a scheduled task each night after school although you could do one on demand if you needed) which means that SC is as upto date with Sims as the last evening.

[mrbios]

Thanks, sounds like Schoolcomms is potentially a much better system...any negatives you or your colleagues have to say about it?

[SouthCoastSaint]

We have been with them for years and the core business of first response attendance (pulls the Ns out of Sims) and sending texts and emails is really robust. Messages can also be written back to Sims. We also use Gateway (online/app reporting) with them which does have a few issues for us, and we are unable to use their online payments but again that's probably a school specific issue.