Unique staff number on SIMS to link with online payment system.

[genesis]

Hi

We are in a process of replacing our Cashless catering and we use Tucasi online payment.

The students UPNs which are under Registration details of a pupil record -are linked with our online payments.

The staffs were not in Tucasi and now we would like to add staff as well to link with Tucasi online payments.

 

But for staff I am not sure which number in SIMS would be a unique staff number that can be setup to link with online payments. Not sure how your systems are setup.

Please suggest.

[localzuk]

Tucasi should be using something other than UPNs for pupils - it is a big no-no to use them outside of schools/DfE.

 

SIMS has a hidden "person number" available via the third party reporting tools which is ideal for use for both pupils and staff.

[genesis]

Please is there a way of finding the personal number , hidden is SIMS.

 

I do have enhanced support with capita will they be able to help.

 

Thanks

[ITBadger]

If you have SQL Server Management Studio installed on your SIMS server then running the following against the sims.sims_person table in the sims table of your main sims database should give you an exhaustive list of person ID's for any staff ever employed at your school. May need a bit of further filtering however..

 

SELECT TOP 20000 [person_id]

,[surname]

,[forename]

FROM [sims].[sims].[sims_person]

where aggregate_role >1000000

[genesis]

I am not very confident running the above , but wondering if a third part tool is exporting the staff and students personal number from SIMS to Tucasi, I was assuming this software must be installed on SIMS.

But on our SIMS server only Groupcall exporter is installed and cant see any jobs running for tucasi.

We use salamander , but it is not installed on SIMS server.

[ITBadger]

Salamander will have access to these numbers as I'm pretty sure that they use it. I'd give their support guys a shout. Their SQL skills will be far better than mine too.

[Edu-IT]

The Tucasi software can pull staff from SIMS or their guide tells you what report to run. Theirs a couple of unique identifiers you could choose.

[pcstru]

Tucasi should be using something other than UPNs for pupils - it is a big no-no to use them outside of schools/DfE.

Presumably they are a school and Tucasi is acting as a 3rd party supplier so the school is the data controller. So is it significantly different than storing the UPN in a 'cloud' MIS?

[Spl1t]

You can use the SIMS_ID and this can be retrieved by creating a new report. The user would need access rights to Third Party Reporting and then they would need to produce a report on staff and add the various columns that are needed. The SIMS_ID is found 'Third Party Reporting' > {Person_ID} and you can save this report to run as and when you get new members of staff.

[Steven_Cleaver]

Hi

 

See below think this is what you after we use a few reports exporting out of SIM's into our own web based software, you can use SIM's CommandReporter to automate the extraction if required.

 

[Spl1t]

Thanks Steven that is exactly what I was trying to explain when a picture would have sufficed

 

The command utility exporter is a fantastic and easy to use tool and it can be used by doing the following:

 

- Open up Command (CMD via Run)

- Type the following: cd C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS.net\CommandReporter.exe and then hit enter (This is a standard install location but can change depending on whether it's 32bit application or user has installed in different location)

- You will then see something like:

- Type the following: /USER: /PASSWORD: /REPORT: /OUTPUT:

- You will have to create the location folder on where you want to output the file and you can use the following output file type: .xml, txt, rtf, csv

 

It's worth noting that there are no spaces between e.g. /USER: and you need not include the < > around the username, password etc

 

Best of luck!

[Steven_Cleaver]

Good explanation of use of CommandReporter as well .

[jinnantonnixx]

As mentioned earlier, SIMS has a person_id field which is unique to each person in SIMS. However, if you are working with more than one SIMS database (you're an LEA, for example), it ceases to be unique.

There's another field (which I think is called External_ID, but I can check on Monday) which is globally unique in the sense that it's a genuine GUID. You might want to use this.

 

That said, if you're not happy about digging into the innards of SIMS, it's best to stick with pre-packaged tools.

Edited February 10, 2017 by jinnantonnixx