[sims] NOVA T6 NCC additional information

[sdc]

Hi

 

We have made good use of the excellent Salamander software to push timetables for staff into their Exchange/Outlook calendars. There is, however, one area which eludes us. Meetings between staff (which can be arranged in T6 as NCC codes with the relevant staff and room) do not carry all the relevant information over into SIMS, and hence therefore into Outlook calendars. For example, if I meet with Mr X on a Tuesday period 3, all that my calendar shows is "MTG" at the appropriate time, both for me and for Mr X. It would be great it it could state "MTG with Mr X".

 

Salamander, quite rightly, can't help with this, as this additional data isn't pulled through into SIMS from T6. However, I was wondering if anyone had any clever ways of making this information appear correctly in SIMS (via T6 or by manipulating the data within SIMS itself afterwards) so that the Salamander scripts could pull this into calendars.

 

Any thoughts? Or am I just being far too fanciful and optimistic....?!

Thanks!

[vikpaw]

We use Engage as the MIS, and create fake year groups to enable this sort of thing.

So we have a year group for Activities, Meetings, Extra Support etc. It might not be allowed in SIMS, and it also has the knock on effect of appearing in all the drops downs / reports, but it works well for us, with no undue side effects.

 

If you couldn't do that, maybe you could look at creating a subject called Meetings, which may allow you to do schedule better, though adding multiple staff still wouldn't really work easily.

 

You might just have to have a lot more codes that are definitive - how long can they be? I forget. Could you have MTG x-y , MTG x-z ...? If not, MTG1,MTG2,MTG3 and a key somewhere that allows translation from a lookup sheet. Salamander will cope with it, if you can just get some kind of code in there. Not that I'm promising things on their behalf - soz Richard.