Norphy Posted January 20, 2019 Posted January 20, 2019 This is pretty much how we achieved this without any consultancy from Capita. The difference is that we have a PowerShell script which uploads the results generated from CommandReporter into a Office 365 SharePoint group. Our Data team then do the PowerBI voodoo with it after that. I’m willing to post the script if anyone wants to see it. 1
DODICT Posted January 20, 2019 Posted January 20, 2019 Sorry but not really integrating with it at all. laughable. If you can utilize the power that enterprise grade business intelligence can offer surely you would have the intelligence to choose an MIS that actually supports it and is directly accessible from the platform ?
Norphy Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 Yeah, because changing your MIS is such a simple, inexpensive, non-time consuming and cheap thing to do, right? I agree that what we do is pretty far from ideal but SIMS is what we’ve got and it’s what we’re stuck with for the foreseeable future and will be until Capita somehow put some proper integration in. Saying “get rid of SIMS” is not a helpful response. 1
DODICT Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 Inexpensive ? Relatively it will be, I’ve never seen a school ditch sims and not save money. False economy if your working round a fundamental issue of poor reporting then solve the route cause. If you did a market review today they wouldn’t be in the frame so why stick with them ? Habit ? Ignorance ? False hope of improvement ? Familiarity ? I’ll say with confidence any school Ive worked with could be better off financially, operationally and strategically within 12 months.
RootsSchImp Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 I'm not going to dive deeply into whether you should switch MIS from SIMS (you should and it won't be as hard as you think). If you're deciding between a power bi gateway (which is the MS program that sits on a server and uploads data to the cloud) or extraction to an online data warehouse (groupcall or similar) that you query from BI I would recommend the latter because even if you're not in a MAT right now it's a fair bet you will be in the future and it will be easier in the long run to integrate other schools into one data warehouse than set them all up separately with their own set of reports and gateways. At Bromcom we initially fed BI from reports but thanks to input from @deshills and others we switched so there's a standard data feed for the MIS and for our MAT data warehouse. 2
matt40k Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 If you're deciding between a power bi gateway (which is the MS program that sits on a server and uploads data to the cloud) or extraction to an online data warehouse (groupcall or similar) that you query from BI I would recommend the latter It's a bit like comparing Apple with Pears. The gateway is just that, GroupCall etc do alot more. I would recommend looking at Assembly as its dirt cheap (https://assembly.education/). I'm sure GroupCall is better, its been around longer but I suspect its more ££. Again, it is a case of plasters on a broken leg but hey, that's life.
GREED Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 Some questions to ask yourself on Analytics to help cover this topic: Do you need Analytics to view across your MAT (aggregates and/or comparisons)? Do you need Analytics to view in a single school? Do you (MAT) have a single MIS or several across the group? Do you need just attendance, conduct, assessment/attainment? Do you need more? Do you need to include additional platforms to be included in your overall Analytics - safeguarding, standardised assessments, etc? Each product on offer in the market offers some or more of these. So find your requirements first and then look at the options.
RootsSchImp Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 As far as I know the drawback with Assembly is that they move your data in packets of 1500 records so if you've got big data volumes it can take a long time for your data to upload. That should only be a concern for biggish MATs though, a few schools should run overnight fine. Some people put a real premium on data being live live - but that's over rated in my view - your attendance/behaviour/attainment today is v similar to what it was yesterday.
matt40k Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 I agree about "real-time" data - you need to act on instantly if you are going to see benefits. Don't under estimate the art of the possible. It's worth looking at what is available today. @GREED is right, but I know sometimes you get yourself into a rut about how difficult everything is and you limit yourself and you need a bit of inspiration.
GREED Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 Some people put a real premium on data being live live - but that's over rated in my view - your attendance/behaviour/attainment today is v similar to what it was yesterday. Agreed - define live? Do you want it to instantly show changes? Why? For an analytics dashboard, who is seeing a chart change .01% going to help there and then? These are not alerting systems (well, they are, but not for that!) to tell you to go hunting for little Johnny because he is not at school, we all have systems that do that. These are systems to help you analyse school performance and see patterns to allow you to take strategic action. In most cases (not all) strategic action is not knee-jerk or on a whim, or based on an instant live change in data. I caveat this with the point that SOME data items can be used for quick/snap decisions, that MAY benefit from quicker data refreshes, but in the main where these decisions are so critical to have, tools to support this will likely already be in the platforms you are already using. 1
Roberto Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 I caveat this with the point that SOME data items can be used for quick/snap decisions, that MAY benefit from quicker data refreshes, but in the main where these decisions are so critical to have, tools to support this will likely already be in the platforms you are already using. And given the volume of data to be processed by both the system and the people looking at the dashboard, there's better returns to be had in focusing tightly on those requirements directly instead of insisting that everything is "live" and somehow expecting the magic to happen. 2
GREED Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 And given the volume of data to be processed by both the system and the people looking at the dashboard, there's better returns to be had in focusing tightly on those requirements directly instead of insisting that everything is "live" and somehow expecting the magic to happen.100% agree. Not everything needs to be updated ever minute of the day. Attendance, yes maybe! Assessment result... Good god no!
rmorrell Posted January 23, 2019 Posted January 23, 2019 This is pretty much how we achieved this without any consultancy from Capita. The difference is that we have a PowerShell script which uploads the results generated from CommandReporter into a Office 365 SharePoint group. Our Data team then do the PowerBI voodoo with it after that. I’m willing to post the script if anyone wants to see it. I wouldn't mind seeing the powershell script please.
sefton Posted February 4, 2019 Posted February 4, 2019 I wouldn't mind seeing the powershell script please. Same here.
matt40k Posted February 4, 2019 Posted February 4, 2019 @Norphy Sounds like it'll be worth adding to GitHub - maybe as a Gist - https://gist.github.com/
Taylor1 Posted February 4, 2019 Posted February 4, 2019 Can anyone explain Power BI licensing, what can you do under normal license and when does a Pro license become necessary?
matt40k Posted February 4, 2019 Posted February 4, 2019 So can open report in PowerBI desktop, edit whatever - that's free. You can publish to the website, that's free. But soon as you need to share it, you need a Pro license. E5 includes a Pro license. You can also pay for capacity, Power BI Premium - think of it as a core license vs user licenses. The problem with PBI Premium is you're look around £5k and Pro licenses are what a few pounds under education licensing. 1
GREED Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 So can open report in PowerBI desktop, edit whatever - that's free. You can publish to the website, that's free. But soon as you need to share it, you need a Pro license. E5 includes a Pro license. You can also pay for capacity, Power BI Premium - think of it as a core license vs user licenses. The problem with PBI Premium is you're look around £5k and Pro licenses are what a few pounds under education licensing. Note that when you publish it to Microsoft, it is available to the public (albeit behind a GUID), so publishing anything via the free method should not contain anything to do with pupil data or anything identifiable or otherwise irksome under GDPR. 2
matt40k Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 Note that when you publish it to Microsoft, it is available to the public (albeit behind a GUID), so publishing anything via the free method should not contain anything to do with pupil data or anything identifiable or otherwise irksome under GDPR. You're thinking of the Publish to Web mate. This basically means it's public - schools should have turned this off. If you want to publish something on a public website, create another tenant. Embed in SharePoint Online \ Embed require you to authenticate using you're Office 365 login. Export to PowerPoint creates screenshots with links back to the (online) PowerBI report. Generally speaking its a good idea not to put sensitive data (ie names) in BI reports. PowerBI security white paper is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-admin-power-bi-security - summary, data is encrypted at rest, transit and uses Azure AD (AKA Office365) for authentication. 2
Taylor1 Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 So embed, embed to Sharepoint, export to PowerPoint are all ok under the free license and not the same as "sharing" under the Pro license?
bfelton Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 So embed, embed to Sharepoint, export to PowerPoint are all ok under the free license and not the same as "sharing" under the Pro license? There is no way of sharing privately within the free licence, the only way to share for free is to publish to the web which is not suitable as previously described. 1
matt40k Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 embed, embed to Sharepoint need Pro license. PowerPoint is a joke and should be avoided like the plague. Publish to web is "free" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-embed-secure#licensing https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-embed-report-spo#licensing https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-publish-to-web#licensing-and-pricing - - - Updated - - - There is no way of sharing privately within the free licence, the only way to share for free is to publish to the web which is not suitable as previously described. Other then sharing the physical PBIX... which isn't ideal. 1
GREED Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 Yes as far as I have understood, if you publish behind a login or walled garden, you have to pay up, otherwise for free anything you publish is public. 1
bfelton Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 I think we have managed to get our pro licences for around £20 per user per year, the content I am building is going to be mainly used by SLT so the costs aren't huge. 1
matt40k Posted February 5, 2019 Posted February 5, 2019 £1.67 per month vs £10. That's a pretty good discount! I miss education licensing
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