SIMS Online/Hosted Requirements

[themanfromict]

We have been looking into switch to either SIMS online or hosted for the last 6 months.

 

Last I heard from Capita they wanted have to run a speed check on our Internet connection, but I heard nothing back from them. Any ideas what we should ideally have? Currently about 10 users running SIMS.

 

Thanks!

[cullingsh]

We moved 1 school to hosted SIMS from a different product. It lasted 10 months and we ripped it out and went local. The broadband connection wasn't the issue. The whole system is just clunky and slow. And support took forever for simple things. Our new users weren't being generated and it would take 3 weeks to resolve the issue, every time.

 

We have now moved another 3 of our schools from hosted to local as the contracts came to an end, as well as a new school to SIMS being installed locally too.

 

Wouldn't touch the current hosted SIMS with a barge-pole.

 

SIMS Primary however (although released too late for the 4 schools we've just migrated) does look good and should be quicker, as you haven't got the daft website to log in to and then wait whilst it thinks, and then waiting forever for the RDP connection to be made etc.

 

Shaun

[matt40k]

If you're a primary school I'd be question why you're throwing more money at Capita rather then reviewing what you've got and seeing if there is a better solution out there. As SIMS Primary - what's the rule with anything Capita? Wait years and years for the bugs to be ironed out.

[themanfromict]

I'm not over concerned about chnaging anything. Business Manager is looking a putting everything new into the new build, stuff the rest of us...

[JATSO]

Were hosted online and I would agree it is clunky but some schools just won't shift from the devil they know no matter what the price, running it on 30MB connection for a primary school. Edited April 17, 2018 by JATSO

[matt40k]

Would love to see the business case put forward to the board of governors for doing it.

[mjk]

Sorry to hijack here. We are also interested in this. I received a document from Capita that states we need to dedicate 3Mb/s per user. I'm not sure why they feel it needs to be so high for an rdp connection, but that's what the document states.

It also says that a pre-requisite is IE11 and RDP 8.1 which isn't going to work very well on Chromebooks or Macs.

[DrCheese]

I would write off Capita until SIMS 8 is a thing (Fully browser based) - Last I heard/saw this was aimed at primaries first.

[mjk]

I've been desperately trying to write off capita, because their product isn't really fit for our needs. Unfortunately, the HT is worried about moving because he doesn't want our system too far out of sync with any other schools in any potential MAT.

Thus to move forward (with Chromebooks) I need to be looking at hosted SIMS as a workaround, but now Capita tell me it would be unsupported ! Does anyone have any success working with Chromebooks and hosted SIMS?