Considering an MIS migration? Top tips.

[Ditto]

I came across the following video, which comes at MIS migration from a school business managers perspective - I thought it was excellent.

 

 

My favourite item was at minute 9:00 where an interesting chart showed the MIS "I don't know" rated fourth in a satisfaction survey!

 

I have no affiliation with the company presenting, I just thought it was a great intro and makes it clear communication is essential throughout. There is some gentle self-advertising promotion at the end, but you can duck out if you want to.

[paulkerton]

Without knowing the sample size, or how it was collected I'm not sure that graph of satisfaction means much at all. Hope they're not basing their business decisions on it...

 

I don't know at 4th place. SIMS in seventh and ahead of Bromcom, iSAMS and Schoolbase? Hmmm!!!

[Ditto]

Without knowing the sample size, or how it was collected I'm not sure that graph of satisfaction means much at all. Hope they're not basing their business decisions on it...

 

I don't know at 4th place. SIMS in seventh and ahead of Bromcom, iSAMS and Schoolbase? Hmmm!!!

 

I've just had an online chat with them and asked that question. In some ways I'm not surprised, remembering that this is likely to be a SLT or SBM view of the world, and not an open-eyed, well researched Edugeek view. Certainly the video was saying look at your needs, look at as many MIS as possible and select the one that suits you based on a variety of criteria, so it didn't look like the chart was going to be used for business decisions.

[KK20]

we migrated from E1 to isams some years ago. It was hell on earth. Raw pure hell.

 

In that time Isams support has gone downhill steadily. I need to complain about every ticket to get it sorted now, the first line support just send a quick boilerplate answer - usually along the lines "internet error get more bandwidth", then low and behold an update a week later fixes it. For a huge chunk of time it wouldn't work on 1024 screen resolutions. A poor resolution perhaps? Yes but not for someone with visual issues on a large monitor - their preferred way of working is to set a fixed resolution rather than need to hotkey zooms (after working with the person it becomes quite clear that it can be a real pain getting some applications to "zoom in" or work with a magnifying glass, it is much easier to lock the screen and text size), and isams DID support that resolution both before and after they upgraded the UI (they forgot to put scroll bars on the tabs so you couldn't cycle tabs not on the screen). They blamed the user on using an old screen resolution - that went down well (the fix on our side was a huge TV on 720p which worked at the time but looked very silly on the desk!)

 

The best ticket ive had from isams has been "we dont support office 365 for email". Pardon? So you dont support one of the largest email servers in the world? Luckily I needed to jump through such hoops with an older UPS so simply used the same relay and added another firewall exception for isams. Zero help at all from isams other than "we can sell you a module that should work".

 

I would say that number 1 on everyone's list should be "quality of support", an MIS will live and die on both fixing a problem or asking a question on "how do I do xxx". More and more, isams answer is becoming "pay for a trainer" when asking a question. They have almost zero documentation now, I hoarded a lot from the early days when the support pages DID have documentation. Luckily I download web pages when I find a good solution to something. For this reason alone I advise people to think twice about isams now so it isnt surprising that they are dropping down the lists when business managers are being told "to fix X you need to spend on a module", Bursars notice when the annual bill goes up a lot

Edited October 1, 2021 by KK20