Firefly

[thimon]

What have others done regarding this?

 

Your Data Manager is correct, duplicating contacts in SIMS is bad practice. We run SIMS and Firefly here, with some staff who are also parents. You can set the Firefly uploader to look at the email address category for a contact and create the relevant users, i.e. email address set as Primary create a staff user, email address set as Main create a parent user, etc. We also have a UDF field in SIMS which needs to be ticked to create a staff Firefly account.

 

Hope that helps?

[kennysarmy]

So we're experiencing some major issues with Firefly and our timetable - I wondered if anyone had any similar experiences.

 

The major issue is with how Firefly reads the timetable from SIMS, specifically it cannot present sixth form timetables correctly - it struggles with study, futures and EPQ and this results in most student timetables being displayed incorrectly (and there is no pattern to this either). It also affects any member of staff which has study on their timetable too, which is around 50% of our staff!

 

We had no such issues with Moodle/Overnet Data.

 

Possible solutions offered by Firefly are : change how we build our timetable (so removing study etc.) or change our software which we use to build our timetable. Er...really?

 

 

Have we got such a complex timetable that Firefly cannot handle it or is there a fundamental issue with Firefly and timetables imported from SIMS.net?

[colly72]

So we're experiencing some major issues with Firefly and our timetable - I wondered if anyone had any similar experiences.

 

The major issue is with how Firefly reads the timetable from SIMS, specifically it cannot present sixth form timetables correctly - it struggles with study, futures and EPQ and this results in most student timetables being displayed incorrectly (and there is no pattern to this either). It also affects any member of staff which has study on their timetable too, which is around 50% of our staff!

 

We had no such issues with Moodle/Overnet Data.

 

Possible solutions offered by Firefly are : change how we build our timetable (so removing study etc.) or change our software which we use to build our timetable. Er...really?

 

 

Have we got such a complex timetable that Firefly cannot handle it or is there a fundamental issue with Firefly and timetables imported from SIMS.net?

 

The only issue we had with timetables and Firefly is that our Junior School timetable was slightly different in it's timings for periods, compared to Senior School, which resulted in Firefly not showing it correctly. I believe that we've introduced the multiple timetable SIMS feature, which has resolved the problem as far as I'm aware.

[Danp]

Ours has been fine (Firefly & WCBS) R-6 have a different timetable to 7-13

[Melmoth]

My students seem to be having a lot of trouble logging onto and using the Firefly website. I don't want to commit to a lot of effort populating the site with resources if its not going to get used so I was wondering, how stable and reliable is the website for students?

[thimon]

I would say very stable and used all the time. For domain joined devices Firefly is set as Google Chrome homepage with automatic O365 SSO logon, with BYOD students and anyone off the network they choose the O365 option on the right hand side of the logon page. We’ve got the benefit of staff using Firefly for years, every homework is put on Firefly, newsletters, communications, timetables, class resources. You need both SLT and all teachers on board for Firefly to work in your school, otherwise no matter how much work you put in it won’t get used.

[eean]

I can’t say that I love firefly but it is stable and reliable for students. Have you contacted their support? They are very good at responding to issues. We had an issue which they tracked down to a huge PDF being embedded on our landing page.

[cw222]

I can’t say that I love firefly but it is stable and reliable for students. Have you contacted their support? They are very good at responding to issues. We had an issue which they tracked down to a huge PDF being embedded on our landing page.

 

Agree, we found it stable and the support great, always polite and knowledgeable, but flexibility on certain things our school wanted to achieve wasn't there. Most of our issues were down to tickboxes and setups within SIMS and had to often manually change the keyring. Office 365 SSO is a must if you want it easily accessible.