[bromcom] Any Bromcom/iSams/Arbor Users in the North West

[sefton]

After having persuaded our management 18 months to put Sims out to pasture and move to a new, shiny MIS only to have them upsticks and leave to a different MAT I am again in a position of having persuaded our leadership team to consider moving to a MIS. Are there any Bromcom/Arbor/iSams users in the North West who would be happy for me to call in and give a brief demonstration of how they use it and some brutal answers of how the migration went, shortcoming/strengths etc.

[ticker]

Happy for you to come for a look at ISAMS and how the migration went. We are based North of Manchester.

[karldenton]

We use Bromcom in our MAT. Had it at 1 school before I started but migrated a school 18 months ago from Sims to Bromcom. To be honest all Bromcom need is a backup of the sims SQL database (not a sims backup) and they import it all for you.

 

We're not far from Ben (above), North of Manchester. I'm on leave this week so have limited access to emails etc

[RootsSchImp]

Bromcom and Arbor (and probably ISAMS too although I don't know) will give you a demo system to play around with if you ask for one. I used to work for Bromcom and their migrations (esp from SIMS) were always really good. One thing to watch out for is the contracts end dates for any 3rd party products you have - obvs the MIS companies want you to sign up for all their features from day one, but to avoid paying double you might be better off negotiating to delay paying for extra features until you're ready to use them.

[sefton]

Happy for you to come for a look at ISAMS and how the migration went. We are based North of Manchester.

 

Cheers for that, I'll drop you a PM and see what your availability it and I'll take a little trip up the East Lancs, although nothing will be set in stone given the current circumstances.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

We use Bromcom in our MAT. Had it at 1 school before I started but migrated a school 18 months ago from Sims to Bromcom. To be honest all Bromcom need is a backup of the sims SQL database (not a sims backup) and they import it all for you.

 

We're not far from Ben (above), North of Manchester. I'm on leave this week so have limited access to emails etc

 

Thanks for that, I'll PM you next week if that is ok, enjoy your leave.

[sefton]

Bromcom and Arbor (and probably ISAMS too although I don't know) will give you a demo system to play around with if you ask for one. I used to work for Bromcom and their migrations (esp from SIMS) were always really good. One thing to watch out for is the contracts end dates for any 3rd party products you have - obvs the MIS companies want you to sign up for all their features from day one, but to avoid paying double you might be better off negotiating to delay paying for extra features until you're ready to use them.

 

I've booked for a Bromcom demo login from next week. I've already put together a list of all the third party apps and their contract lengths for our schools as the financial case has to be convincing for our trust.

[sefton]

As I'm sure you can imagine this got put on hold pretty rapidly but we are moving again, we had a beauty parade of three companies which we've reduced to two doing an in-depth day each. Does anybody have a scoring system or questionnaire for staff who are the audience for the deep dive that I can use as a starting point so I can gauge how it is received?

[paulkerton]

Any MIS in it's Assessment Framework should be able to create completely customised assessments, with complete control of:

• Assessment types
  
• Grade set and collections schools are able to collect
  

And they should be able to:

• Collect as much information as you want as often as you want to collect it
  
• Create built-in calculations from the information as part of your set up
  
• Use multiple criteria that will update the results as data is entered live
  
• In theory they should also reduce the need to process data before you enter it into the MIS, or after information is output by the MIS. You should be able to input your result into it, and get the calculated answer after without exporting to spreadsheets.
  

 

Also any MIS software’s behaviour tool should be flexible enough so that behaviour is customisable to your school's policies and behaviour workflow.