EduLinkOne - Singing Praises

[BKGarry]

Hello all,

 

So it has been 3 days since I have installed EduLinkOne on our SIMS Server and it has been great.

 

The LDAP integration, wonderful! No second usernames and passwords needed for Staff and Students.

The Admin guide, so simple to go through and get things.

 

The Support Amazing every email about silly little questions, either because I have missed them in the manual, or that they are to do with the back-end workings (like scheduled CRON tasks) they have contacted back withing 5 minutes with an answer or a solution.

 

I am truly impressed with these guys so far, and the product is lovely, time to play with it a bit more and soft launch it before we go for our major launch, but I cannot begin to say how nice an experience it has been

[DavidYoung]

We've had the same experience. I've put it into our two secondary schools and everything has been great. The staff love the platform, it's so easy to use, especially compared to SIMS. I love that the integration was the most straight-foward SIMS integration I've ever had to install and that it replaces so many existing products.

 

The support too have been great and they actually started developing improvements that we asked for during our trial period. I think they've made 2 fairly big developments that we've asked for in the last 3 months. I met up with their product mangager and MD at BETT and had a good conversation about the product and they really have the right idea for how they want to develop it to be more useful to schools.

 

The fact that it will likely save each school around £2k per year on licensing and messaging costs is obviously a great benefit too.

[jthompson]

Yep, one of the easiest big changes we've made in a while.

[synaesthesia]

Been with them a while and we've certainly been more than happy; support has been fantastic, usually spotting & fixing things before we've even noticed. Products are growing in maturity & ability all the time, they take on board ideas and even some of the newer features which have been in development for a tiny period of time feel more polished than some of the hugely expensive offerings from other providers.

[supportman]

Love the look of this, are this company new or is it a new product? I've not heard of them before.

 

What kind of prices are we looking at?

[tj2419]

Love the look of this, are this company new or is it a new product? I've not heard of them before.

 

What kind of prices are we looking at?

They've been around a good few years as they used to work with webanywhere but then went off on their own and created edulinkone.

 

One of our favourite suppliers and the product just works and they keep adding really useful features with no increase in cost.

[BKGarry]

Overnetdata (the company themselves) and EduLink One have had a large presence at BETT in the past, I must admit I didn't look for them this year, but they are not that new to the market.

 

The product itself it very nice, I have cashless catering information pulling in as well, it is a very nice system to administer, although our school wide launch is in 3-6weeks time

[supportman]

They've been around a good few years as they used to work with webanywhere but then went off on their own and created edulinkone.

 

One of our favourite suppliers and the product just works and they keep adding really useful features with no increase in cost.

 

Yep just adding up the messaging, parents evenings, parent portal, room booking we probably spend 5k a year on all that currently.

 

Looks good for the 2k cost and cloud based. Hmmm...

[vikpaw]

Plus it links in really well with Titus for a bespoke VLE, if people still use those.

[supportman]

Just setting the trial of this up and its absolutely brilliant. All setup in about 10mins!

 

One thing I am stuck on is how to populate active directory 'Office' field(physicalDeliveryOfficeName in LDAP terms) with the “MIS id”. Has anyone done this? How do I find the MIS ID if we use Sims?

 

Staff should be easy enough to populate manually but are there any tricks on populating students with the MIS id?

[BKGarry]

@supportman

 

We picked an attribute from ADSI Edit (we used Pager) and let the support team know, and then the support team populated it for us.

[jthompson]

We use one of the custom attributes in AD. For staff we use the MIS ID, which the EduLink agent automatically populates for us. I believe it uses email addresses to match up SIMS staff records with their AD accounts, writing the MIS ID into AD accordingly. We haven't had to do that manually.

 

For students, we set up the EduLink agent to use Admission Number rather than MIS ID. We already had Admission Numbers entered into AD anyway, in a different attribute. We do that as part of the initially provisioning of their AD account when they join the school.

[supportman]

Excellent thats good to know, as we already have unique email addresses in AD hopefully it should be easy. Great that they do this for us!

[jthompson]

The reason I say 'believe' is because I had a member of staff who didn't have an EduLink account, and there was no MIS ID as expected in her AD account. After correcting her email address in SIMS, the MIS ID later appeared and her EduLink account was provisioned and working. I can't actually see any options for that behaviour anywhere and it's a while since we initially started up with EduLink. It may be that email addresses are only a part of how records are matched up between SIMS and AD.

Our parents, BTW, are 'manual' account types (i.e. not using LDAP), so their logins are provisioned and managed entirely within EduLink.

[jonrose]

Hi, we are looking to set up a trial with ELO very soon. Everyone here seems to love the product, but I was wondering if there were any problems with it that anyone has encountered? How is the functionality of this product when compared with SMHW, ClassCharts, etc? How have people found rolling ELO out to staff/parents/students?

 

Sorry for all of the questions, it just seems that for the price it's too good to be true!

[synaesthesia]

The only general problems we've had from the outset is "Argh, I wish it could do xyz or maybe show abc in that bit". Let them know and something's been added, sometimes literally as a same-day fix, often in the next update.

Rolling it out has been simple and the only problems with that is the usual human error like letters left in the bottom of a bag or trying hard to avoid giving details to the parents in the first place. However over the last year we've concentrated hard on getting correct email addresses for parents and that has alleviated the majority of those issues. We've just started using it for parents evenings fully too and that's prompted a load of kids to come forward who never got the details home too

Reliability has been excellent.

[BKGarry]

SMHW we scrapped 3 years ago for ClassCharts,

 

I have got ELO adding some desk shapes at the moment for the seating planner. It does lack a little bit in that you cannot setup a seating plan for a class which does not exist on the SIMS Timetable but we are paying less for ELO than we are for Classcharts (which is going)

 

We are currently in week 2 on a 6 week testing process before we go live.

 

Another praise for them for me, we had a potential issue, where data collection for staff and students/parents went to the same people, which was a potential data issue. I enquired about it on Monday last week, and I have received an email this morning to say they have added the functionality in for there to be separate Data Collection Managers for Staff and then Students. Just wow on that one

[jthompson]

We're gradually introducing things one module at a time. So far, the only one we've definitely decided to hold off on was the room booking module. It doesn't have enough functionality for us yet as we're used to having bookings require approval from key staff, with those same key staff having more administrative control (to make bookings on behalf of others, etc.).

 

I say 'yet' because I'm pretty confident that the product will be developed further. We're basically going to come back to that module and have another look at a later time.

 

We're trialling homework at the moment, so not sure if it will be replacing SMHW yet. SMHW is pretty feature rich, but EduLink has that '80/20' feel about it, where it's providing the right 20% of core functionality that's needed to allow for 80% of what people are going to need. Even if the homework is more basic, being able to do away with one more service provider is a big plus. That's been one of our main plus points about EduLink: being able to provide lots of services to parents and staff under one UI, rather than several completely different ones. There's a great deal of value in that alone, feature-parity aside.

[jonrose]

Thanks for the replies, it all looks very positive. I'm impressed at the response times mentioned so far, it seems like they are keen to work with schools to produce exactly what is needed rather than leave us to make do.

 

A question our office manager has just asked is what is the register taking functionality like? From an attendance p.o.v, is the write back immediate? From a cover p.o.v how do you manage allowing external supply staff to have access, if at all?

 

Finally, how does it work for teachers who are also a parent at the school?

[synaesthesia]

We were quite happy to replace SMHW with Edulink; featurewise not quite there as you say but with the downtime SMHW had over the last year was just diabolical.

 

Oh and sorry forgot to add we do indeed have separate accounts for teacher parents.

Edited March 6, 2019 by synaesthesia

[BKGarry]

Finally, how does it work for teachers who are also a parent at the school?

 

For ours, we have completely separate teacher and parent accounts. Teacher accounts are Sync'd with LDAP/AD

 

Parent accounts are separate, emailed out details.

[supportman]

Nothing but positives from me as well, its great and hopefully going to replace 4 different systems we currently buy.

 

I was particularly impressed with the install procedure and the ease of which it was done.

 

Feature wise the cover and registration works as expected but the room booking is a little limited.

[BKGarry]

With limited features, I find emailing the helpdesk/support address with what I would like, they are very responsive, they are working on features I have asked for, like the Data Collection one and the adding of a desk shape to the seating planner.

 

Asking for the functionality is the best way, they seem to try their best to get it in.

[Quatermass]

We're very interested especially as it could potentially replace 4 systems here, but one of those 4 is SMHW and given SMHW's features/embeddedness we might not want to use EduLink's homework feature yet (or possibly at all, depends) - does EduLink allow you to turn particular features on and off, so for example we could leave its homework feature hidden to avoid confusion?

[BKGarry]

We're very interested especially as it could potentially replace 4 systems here, but one of those 4 is SMHW and given SMHW's features/embeddedness we might not want to use EduLink's homework feature yet (or possibly at all, depends) - does EduLink allow you to turn particular features on and off, so for example we could leave its homework feature hidden to avoid confusion?

 

Yup, you can turn anything on and off for parents, learners and staff individually. Basically you can break it in easily and even rename the icons.