System Administration for SIMS

[owen1978]

Hi,

 

I am starting a new job as systems admin, the school uses SIMS.

Haven't used it before

 

So what would a system admin role entail for SIMS is it the usual i.e. backups and updates?

Also could you point me towards some guides towards backing up, updating etc.. and anything else you think I might need.

 

Is there any gotchas about the system that I need to know about too?

 

Your help and advice would be very much appreciated

 

Thank you for your time

[Ditto]

Others will give lots of good advice and likely a lot of opinions. Is your support provided direct by Capita or someone else? You're going to want to get an account set up to access online documentation. Is the school primary, secondary or both. Ask to get some off-site training.

[cw222]

Were there any tasks outlined in your Job Description ? System admin with SIMS could really mean a large amount of things depending on what the data manager/ Network manager do at the school. ie are you responsible for end of year/ academic year progression.

 

A Few random thoughts :

 

There are lots of guides on Capita my account, so once you get started, and set up with a Capita My Account, you can view these or sometimes you can catch them via google.

 

Depending on your support package you will have access to phone support (or not in our case) and priority tickets. These can be created through My Account. Some schools have Local Authority support.

 

Do you know if the school uses Solus 3? It is used by a lot to handle SIMS deployment and Patching. Much easier than without (in my opinion)

 

Like anything, make good robust backups before updating. (and test your backups when you can!!)

 

Schedule updates out of hours (you don't want to grind the school to a halt if you can help it!)

 

Run DB diagnose tool in SIMS regularly to make sure everything is working as intended in regards to data.

 

Tools > Housekeeping has some good tools to run.

 

SIMS does not close any windows automatically, so if you have clicked on something else you can get back to it via Window > What you were on before

 

Check that attendance marks have been archived.

 

Don't be the first person to upgrade to a new spring/summer/autumn release. Upgrade when suits you/the school (unless critical) as SIMS releases can sometimes come with bugs that may get ironed out. Wait a few weeks if you can.

 

Make sure what you do with Data is in line with GDPR policies in regards to deletion/retention of data. Ask your Data officer if unsure

[jthompson]

You can't put SIMS into maintenance mode to keep/chuck users out, or even really see which users are in. That makes deploying patches and upgrades during a working day a bit of a no no for a large enough organisation (unless you're good at herding cats). I just arrange to do them well out of hours, regardless of how urgently someone wants a patch applied.

 

Even though a database backup is performed automatically by the upgrade tools when applying SIMS patches and upgrades, always take your own database backup before you start, using whatever SQL Server backup/restore tools you have. I've known patches to fail and then fail to rollback successfully, necessitating a restore of the db backup I took.

 

Also, in my experience, if you deploy an upgrade during a holiday, SOLUS3 might decide to class that deployment as having failed if a high enough proportion of clients remain offline for too long afterwards. However, everything will still work and those clients will pick up the update for themselves when they finally do appear online. I prefer to try and get them scheduled either just before the end of a term, or just before the start, so that plenty of clients will be online in the hours and days after starting the deployment, and SOLUS3 will be happier about the progress of the deployment.

[owen1978]

Hi,

 

Thanks for all your replies.

 

I will start my job around about mid September, so I don't have access to a my capita account. I would have like to prepared myself a bit.

I come from the CMIS world where the wasn't any local client software to install on users machines just a shorcut to the database & program on a shared drive.

 

I hope they have SOLUS 3 it sounds great, and the moment I have no details, so I am really shooting in the dark.

 

So SIMS has client software that needs to be updated as well as the main application on the server?

[jthompson]

So SIMS has client software that needs to be updated as well as the main application on the server?

 

Yes, but with SOLUS 3 each client has an agent running that will check for and install any upgrades that have been deployed. The SOLUS dashboard on the server also lets you see what version your clients currently have installed, as well as push out fresh installations to new clients.

[DrBeaker]

We use SIMS as did my last school. I know how to support it, fix it etc but not how to use the app itself - never had any training on it.

 

We've got a support company for SIMs who are pretty good and know their stuff.

 

SOLUS3 is good from my experience of using it. The upgrade failure thing is a bit wierd as another poster, put because the machines are offline the upgrade has "failed". Could be 1x machine out of 100 that's just been unplugged. I tend to check them by rooms/blocks as it's easier for me to manage and check.