Microsoft SDS & SIMS ID - Licence needed?

[robyholmes]

Hi All,

 

We currently sync classes in to Office 365 from SIMS using Microsoft SDS & CSV files from SIMS. However I now know that it supports an automatically sync from SIMS via SIMS ID. I looked at this over a year ago but was told by our LA support team that it required a SIMS ID licence.

 

Could anyone confirm this? At the time they didn't know what the licence was or cost so I took it no further. Recently however I've been people talking about it on here so I wondered if it was still a cost or if it was free?

 

Thanks, Rob

[cooper549]

SIMS ID still has a free element AFAIK(not sure if this is still the case), but in our experience it did cause us more trouble than it was worth, as it never correctly mapped our students. We always had to go in and manually match and sync everything because it didn't seem to work with the sub-domains, despite their support stating it should when you use the your primary domain.

 

We ran it for a year and I got really fed up with the lack of support for the issues no matter how many tickets I logged or time I spent on the phone with them. We ended up biting the bullet and Have just moved over to salamanders tool only just yesterday, but having already used the basic one for SDS, I'm more than happy already to get rid of SIMS ID.

[robyholmes]

SIMS ID still has a free element AFAIK(not sure if this is still the case), but in our experience it did cause us more trouble than it was worth, as it never correctly mapped our students. We always had to go in and manually match and sync everything because it didn't seem to work with the sub-domains, despite their support stating it should when you use the your primary domain.

 

We ran it for a year and I got really fed up with the lack of support for the issues no matter how many tickets I logged or time I spent on the phone with them. We ended up biting the bullet and Have just moved over to salamanders tool only just yesterday, but having already used the basic one for SDS, I'm more than happy already to get rid of SIMS ID.

 

Was this a problem with SDS or SIMS ID? We're running SDS using the CSV file method and its working very well. I'm just trying to automate it more by using SIMS ID. I know SIMS ID has a free version which is used to run the Parent Lite app. However my understand was you needed a full licence for SDS. I think I'll have another go at setting it up for next year.

[cooper549]

You don't need to pay to use SIMS ID to sync to SDS, It was a free license when we used it, unless they have started charging. If you already have SIMS ID you can check in the settings there should be some options for office 365 and groups available.

 

Our problem was with SIMS ID and the way it seemed to interpret domains for its part in the SDS sync, It never seemed to match for multiple domains/subdomains. For example, The staff a domain was along the lines of '[email protected]' but the students were '[email protected]' and for some reason SIMS ID treated these separately despite them stating on their documentation and support if you use the top 'domain.com' it should match any sub-domains. But because this never worked for us, we had to self-onboard each time for each domain when we needed to sync.

 

I can't imagine everyone has this issue as it it seem very niche, but it was quite problematic for us, and the only thing I honestly think that would've fixed our issue was starting from scratch, but we had never used SIMS ID before, so we were a brand new installation to begin with and it happened right from start.

Edited November 20, 2019 by cooper549

[robyholmes]

You don't need to pay to use SIMS ID to sync to SDS, It was a free license when we used it, unless they have started charging. If you already have SIMS ID you can check in the settings there should be some options for office 365 and groups available.

 

Our problem was with SIMS ID and the way it seemed to interpret domains for its part in the SDS sync, It never seemed to match for multiple domains/subdomains. For example, The staff a domain was along the lines of '[email protected]' but the students were '[email protected]' and for some reason SIMS ID treated these separately despite them stating on their documentation and support if you use the top 'domain.com' it should match any sub-domains. But because this never worked for us, we had to self-onboard each time for each domain when we needed to sync.

 

I can't imagine everyone has this issue as it it seem very niche, but it was quite problematic for us, and the only thing I honestly think that would've fixed our issue was starting from scratch, but we had never used SIMS ID before, so we were a brand new installation to begin with and it happened right from start.

 

Thank you for confirming that. We use a single domain so that should help. We're also looking at moving MIS so it might be I leave SIMS as is and just setup automatic sync from the new MIS. Here's hoping.