sims-student.co.uk - Registration Process - Are other schools seeing the same issues?

[David44]

We have introduced SIMS Student this year and so since September we have had 1600+ students creating accounts (using Google as their account provider) and trying to log in. In most cases, this process seems to go like this...

 

 

• Student clicks on link in Invitation email from Capita (once it finally arrives, but that's a different issue)
  
• Student clicks on 'Sign in with Google' (as we are also introducing Chromebooks, all students have a Google account).
  
• Student selects Google account/logs in to Google account.
  
• Student clicks 'Register' button on screen with 'Name', 'Signed in with' and 'Invitation Code' fields (all three fields being populated already)
  
• Student types in their date of birth when prompted and clicks on Verify button.
  
• Account creation screen with progress bar appears for a few seconds.
  
• SIMS Student error page stating "Unauthorised Access. Please contact your school for access to this site" appears.
  

 

This happens every time a student attempts to register unless they are foiled by one of the other many issues (invitation emails not being received, the account registration stage timing out etc.). Obviously if the students is trying this at home, they might give up at this point and who could blame them? When we are going through this with students in school we talk them through these additional steps...

 

• Student clicks on 'Sign Out' at the top of the SIMS Student Error page.
  
• Student goes back to SIMS Student
  
• Student clicks on 'Sign in with Google'
  
• Student selects Google account/logs in to Google account
  
• SIMS Student appears as expected in most cases (sometimes they still see "Unauthorised Access. Please contact your school for access to this site" at this stage and the only way to resolve that seems to be to send them another invitation code and wait the minutes/hours or even days that it takes before Capita decide to send that).
  

 

Is this normal? As we only started using SIMS Student in September, this is normal for us and we have never seen the registration process work as it should. Does this happen at other schools, if so, has it only started happening recently? Once students have managed to register, it seems to work. They can log in every time without issue, that is if the painful registration process hasn't put them off the whole thing.

 

I have logged this with Capita but as usual have had no response.

 

David

Edited October 3, 2018 by David44