EduLink One Feedback?

[Chaniel]

How does the catering stuff work? What system does it sync with?

We use Civica for our cashless catering (previously NRS Ltd), believe it also integrates with Cunninghams cashless catering as well. It cost about £100 one-off for Civica to install the Truste Web Service which EduLink One then links into to display what students have purchased and their balance to both students and parents. They can't top up their balance using EduLink One (yet?).

 

It has definitely cut down queue times at the reval units, which students would use to just check their balance and not necessarily top up with. Helps parents monitor what their child is eating in one place, instead of having to go into the SCOPay app separately, has definitely made a positive difference.

[Linfit]

How does the catering stuff work? What system does it sync with?

 

We use Cunninnghams and they charged us £70 to remote in and configure the link, only took a few minutes, and it just works.

I beleive if you have later versions of the Cunninghams software the relevant modules are already present and it won't cost anything to set up the link.

[FragglePete]

We got the brochure too - with the free KitKat (Yum!) Looks good, but for what I can see it doesn't have a payment gateway? Or am I wrong.

 

Pete

[Linfit]

We got the brochure too - with the free KitKat (Yum!) Looks good, but for what I can see it doesn't have a payment gateway? Or am I wrong.

 

Pete

 

No it doesn't. Currently you can view balances and see the the day's transactions but you cannot make payments.

I believe they are looking at this but assume its a big job as handling payments gets you into a compliance and standards minefield that they might not be too keen to get into.

[markwilfan]

We got the brochure too - with the free KitKat (Yum!) Looks good, but for what I can see it doesn't have a payment gateway? Or am I wrong.

 

Pete

I ate the KitKat without looking at the leaflet [emoji44] although I did send a link to it to my IT director last week after finding it on edugeek so hopefully that's better

[rob_coles]

We've was an early adopter of Edulink One we migrated from the Moodle variant.

 

Our Staff/Students & parents feedback is always positive.

 

We've saved a load of cash by ditching a whole load of products.

 

The best thing is at Overnet they develop the product. We fairly often request a features/modifications. Best 2k we've spent.

 

We're just waiting/hoping a payment integration comes soon.

 

Rob

[armadillo]

Great system, staff love it and very popular with students and parents. It all works and great value!

[Gongalong]

I believe they are looking at this but assume its a big job as handling payments gets you into a compliance and standards minefield that they might not be too keen to get into.

We asked about Tucasi, and currently no integration with that.

[howartp]

Sadly we've just done a wholesale change of products with our parents this summer, so much as I liked the kitkat brochure, we won't be in a position to look at it any time soon.

[Gongalong]

We've got a lot of resources invested in SMHW and MINTclass, so it will be a wrench to migrate from those. I'm also a huge fan of Parents Evening System and Room Booking System, but we're going to trial EduLink at least and see if there are any showstoppers, in terms of missing features.

[supportman]

Just testing this again on the demo site here and its fantasticly smooth and modern to use. Our teachers are really impressed.

 

https://www.edulinkone.com/#!/

 

It makes me wonder if Overnet are going to create their own MIS as they have done most of the hard work already!

[FragglePete]

Just got this setup as a trial and looks very impressive so far. We too could ditch some other stuff if this proves useful. If they had a payment gateway in place then we could ditch even more stuff and save a lot of money.

 

Support seem very responsive when I've asked questions in helping get setup.

 

The App looks quite good as well, but does appear bit jittery on our older iPADs. I've played with Android App on my phone, and this seems better as it's not got any fancy animations running on it.

 

Pete

[Gongalong]

And then everyone moves to the company and they explode due to number of customers

[mthomas08]

Well we signed up last year in September.

 

Barely any complaints, our Parents love the system and we have around 80% of them logged on. Our previous system SLG wasn’t popular at all.

 

The negatives: Most are related to our data side and some are quite picky which is always a good thing in my book.

• We don’t have all the parents email addresses/personal details etc.

• Occasional password resetting

• Not everyone is aware of the system, even though we’ve constantly advertised it to staff, students & parents

 

Actual EduLink issues

- Low screen resolutions can cause the Parents Evening print/export button to overlap the timetable button (at the bottom) – our solution for staff is to zoom out

- Not a replacement for SIMs Attendance messaging. We didn’t expect this part - SIMs actually receives messages from parents which can be quickly recorded to the child’s records (I didn’t actually know this until Attendance office showed me)

- It takes a while to manually update from SIMs due to the size of our database, plus EduLink probably have safeguards to limit their own bandwidth usage.

- Lack of forgotten password ability for parents.

 

This really has been a complete success for us (mentioned in another thread). The best portal I've ever had to deal with.

[SouthCoastSaint]

Well we signed up last year in September.

 

Barely any complaints, our Parents love the system and we have around 80% of them logged on. Our previous system SLG wasn’t popular at all.

 

 

- Not a replacement for SIMs Attendance messaging. We didn’t expect this part - SIMs actually receives messages from parents which can be quickly recorded to the child’s records (I didn’t actually know this until Attendance office showed me)

- It takes a while to manually update from SIMs due to the size of our database, plus EduLink probably have safeguards to limit their own bandwidth usage.

- Lack of forgotten password ability for parents.

 

This really has been a complete success for us (mentioned in another thread). The best portal I've ever had to deal with.

 

Parents can request a password reset now, they introduced it a while back. If I recall it doesn't work when parents share an email address.

 

Also, there is a log to sims button in the messages screen to log attendance (and other) messages. It puts the message in the communication log but in a very clunky way (we were using Schoolcomms and have it until June, our attendance officer has reverted to using it until then). Also you can't reply to Text messages which for certain parents the best way to get a first response reply when chased.

 

Our school is 1800 on roll and a sync takes all day. This is very frustrating if you have uploaded an ind rep to email home as it doesn't appear for hours.

 

These are niggles for us but the benefits so far easily outweigh these.

[nahtan]

We purchased Edulink One initially for our PE staff to take registers. This works seamlessly and is a lot better than other solutions we’ve had in the past and comes in at a very similar price than just a register app. You get a load more features which we haven’t yet fully engaged with due to having numerous other systems in place - we hope to migrate eventually!

Support has been very good and if we’ve asked for something, they’ve often been keen to help us implement it

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

We had a primary school who evaluated it before Christmas and decided it wasn't for them. The already have programs that do a lot of what Edulink does but Edulink was only a replacement for some of the functionality so they would need to keep their existing software as well and they couldn't justify the extra cost.

E.g. one system generates bills for before and after care club, based on the number of sessions attended.

The school don't have any SIM equipped mobile devices and their IT policy states that staff can only use school issues devices for pupil data, thus they wanted an offline mode for the App.

Edulink couldn't display the current dinner money balance from SIMS

They didn't think much of the mail merge functionality for building emails. (this one I think just needs a better UI)

The lack of a payment system integration

[Gongalong]

Our school is 1800 on roll and a sync takes all day. This is very frustrating if you have uploaded an ind rep to email home as it doesn't appear for hours.

That's concerning. I can't see on the SIMS sync app what it's doing in terms of sync, and I don't seem to be able to trigger a sync.

 

We use Schoolcomms and Parents Evening System atm, and although it doesn't sync up as much as Edulink does, these take a minute to sync up, if that.

 

I wonder why Edulink takes so long?

[synaesthesia]

Have a chat with them - it's a scheduled sync, so does it overnight by default rather than it taking a long time. The sync process itself is a couple of minutes max.

[mthomas08]

That's concerning. I can't see on the SIMS sync app what it's doing in terms of sync, and I don't seem to be able to trigger a sync.

 

We use Schoolcomms and Parents Evening System atm, and although it doesn't sync up as much as Edulink does, these take a minute to sync up, if that.

 

I wonder why Edulink takes so long?

 

It's quite a lot of data to keep live, and even though we have an impressive broadband capacity.. EduLink probably have limits in place to keep their own system stable. Considering how many schools can potentially sync data throughout the day.

It only becomes an issue when parents need to use parents evening in the last 24/48 hours before the event. Most parents get signed up quickly.

 

I wouldn't complain if we could edit the email address in EduLink, although we can send the account details directly because you can see the username/password. Perhaps even the ability to sync specific data would help.

 

Still I can't recommend this product enough and the issues are very small ones. We've been pushing out emails to parents since September and it's very easy to do.

[Gongalong]

What do you all use for an SMTP server? Would we be safe to use the server given to us by VMB?

[pooley]

I've created an account/mailbox in o365 for mail connectivity.

[Chaniel]

What do you all use for an SMTP server? Would we be safe to use the server given to us by VMB?

 

We use Office 365 and a service account (e.g. [email protected]).

[deano3693]

Is anyone using the Homework part of Edulink having moved from Show My Homework? We are considering this to save money just looking for honest feedback ...

[synaesthesia]

Is anyone using the Homework part of Edulink having moved from Show My Homework? We are considering this to save money just looking for honest feedback ...

 

We did, we had both to start with and as Edulink improved we saw it was only slightly behind in terms of functionality. A little later on, SMH started being down more often then it was up and just had too many issues. Haven't looked back, saved a lot of money, staff find it a lot easier, parents and children both appreciate it more as well as it's another app/website less they had to worry about.