Firefly and Schoolcomms

[techsmith320]

We have an issue where we use Schoolcomms as our parent communication tool, we really like it but are having issues with staff who are also parentsSchoolcomms only takes the MAIN email address from SIMS and uses that email for sending out stuff.Which for most people is fineBut staff who are also parents have had to separate out their email and roles in SIMS to be able to have their staff and parent logins as set by Firefly (Staff- Primary and Parent email- Main)Which means anything sent to "staff" (who is also a parent) via schoolcomms sends to their personal email address, even if its a "staff" message (which could lead to a major Data protection issue here potentially)We can't be the only school using Schoolcomms and Firefly together, so how do you make it work?

[David44]

We use both Firefly and Schoolcomms and we have the opposite problem to you. Our Staff members who are also parents get all Schoolcomms messages to their school email address even if it is about their child. When I raised this with Schoolcomms a few years ago, their support seemed to suggest we create two SIMS records, one for the person as a member of staff and another for the same person as a parent. We did not do this.

 

It's worth mentioning that the Firefly Uploader can be made to look at a SIMS User Defined Field now when it comes to creating Staff logins/profiles rather than just assuming every staff record that has a Primary email address should have a Firefly login/profile which is it's default set up and how we have ours set up at the moment. We are planning to have a Firefly tickbox in SIMS so that we can control access to Firefly by ticking or unticking a box in SIMS, much easier that trying to work out what ramifications making an email address primary/main etc. is going to have to all the various third party systems we use. As for Schoolcomms, we are moving to SIMS Intouch shortly, so that will get rid of one issue but no doubt raise many others.

[techsmith320]

oh, thanks! very useful, I'll follow up the idea of a separate Staff Firefly UDFWe actually moved FROM intouch after the 3 different ISP's kept blocking Intouch messages (yahoo, AOL and BTinternet) as spam and kept rejecting and Intouch messages from their servers!