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ESS SIMS 3 Year Contracts

DavidYoung

By DavidYoung
in MIS Systems

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enjay

enjay

Posted
Posted
Imagine if the software just worked and you didn't need to pay for support

 

That's quite a burden to put on your IT team. We have support agreements for all our high profile systems, as there will always be a time you have a weird problem which you've not seen before and don't have the time to troubleshoot it from scratch, or want to do more with the system and need some advice.

  • Thanks 2
mavhc

mavhc

Posted
Posted
But why do they make you pay to fix their problems? Fixing a bug and explaining how the software works are different things, you can pay for not bothering to read the manual, but paying for their bugs is being scammed
BKGarry

BKGarry

Posted
Posted
But why do they make you pay to fix their problems? Fixing a bug and explaining how the software works are different things, you can pay for not bothering to read the manual, but paying for their bugs is being scammed

 

for any MIS there are different requirements year on year for the the DfE requires for census returns. Any MIS would need to supply updates and development costs on a rolling basis, this is not just SIMS.

 

Now mavhc, I have sat here quietly but you are trying to wind people up again, well that is how it is coming across, so I would say you need to stop replying for a while now.

localzuk

localzuk

Posted
Posted
Don't you pay for updates though?

An MIS isn't like buying, say, Call of Duty. You are not paying for a specific product that will remain the same (except bug fixes). You are paying for ongoing provision of an MIS that complies with all the needs of your organisation - legal, data protection, safeguarding etc... Which means it is a constantly changing service.

 

So, what you're paying for is that service - which is delivered to you in the form of software, updates and support. They are all one thing though really - the service.

  • Thanks 3
enjay

enjay

Posted
Posted
An MIS isn't like buying, say, Call of Duty. You are not paying for a specific product that will remain the same (except bug fixes). You are paying for ongoing provision of an MIS that complies with all the needs of your organisation - legal, data protection, safeguarding etc... Which means it is a constantly changing service.

 

So, what you're paying for is that service - which is delivered to you in the form of software, updates and support. They are all one thing though really - the service.

 

Exactly that. Lots of other products charge an annual cost which includes the licence, software updates/maintenance and technical support. The only difference with SIMS is ESS price the licence/updates and the support separately, recognising that some schools choose to or are forced to get their support from LA, or choose to have someone like Turn It On or Scomis host the whole server for you. Therefore, ESS pricing allows for you to pay the compulsory licence and updates/maintenance to them and the support to someone else (or opt out of support altogether and go it alone, if you're feeling brave).

mthomas08

mthomas08

Posted
Posted
An MIS isn't like buying, say, Call of Duty. You are not paying for a specific product that will remain the same (except bug fixes). You are paying for ongoing provision of an MIS that complies with all the needs of your organisation - legal, data protection, safeguarding etc... Which means it is a constantly changing service.

 

So, what you're paying for is that service - which is delivered to you in the form of software, updates and support. They are all one thing though really - the service.

 

I completely agree, we are paying for the whole package but how is that service level?

 

People are angry because of the level of

service

support

reliability

development

customer service

 

For such a high cost product, should it be better? Yes and that's why people are angry about the cost.

 

Also, if I chose to compare an MIS to a game.. I'd choose an MMO... which do go through developments and updates etc.

mavhc

mavhc

Posted
Posted
Exactly that. Lots of other products charge an annual cost which includes the licence, software updates/maintenance and technical support. The only difference with SIMS is ESS price the licence/updates and the support separately, recognising that some schools choose to or are forced to get their support from LA, or choose to have someone like Turn It On or Scomis host the whole server for you. Therefore, ESS pricing allows for you to pay the compulsory licence and updates/maintenance to them and the support to someone else (or opt out of support altogether and go it alone, if you're feeling brave).

 

So you can pay for updates and support as 2 different products? Interesting.

 

So what happens when you find a bug and you've not paid for support? Do they want to fix it?

localzuk

localzuk

Posted
Posted
So you can pay for updates and support as 2 different products? Interesting.

 

Yes. You can choose to not get support from ESS, and can take up support from a third party unit instead. We did when we used it. We used Somerset County Council's MIS team for support instead. At the time, I believe the third party units got a bit of the yearly maintenance cost as a rebate as well.

So what happens when you find a bug and you've not paid for support? Do they want to fix it?

You report it to your support unit, and they report it to ESS. You're still paying for maintenance.

 

If you're paying neither, then you don't report anything and don't get any fixes.

  • 2 months later...
Griff

Griff

Posted
Posted

Just one to be careful of folks. We were using ParentPay through our old caterers so they used to get invoiced by ParentPay and we linked it to our systems. We changed our caterer and payment system to something else now ParentPay have invoiced us for a 3 year contract costing about £4,000 and they won't budge on letting us out of it.

 

Admittedly I guess we could of made sure this wasn't going to end up falling back on us when we changed catering companies but having never had to pay for it or sign any invoices to suddenly get one... bit of a shock...more of a shock is how absolutely out of order they are being about it.

jmak

jmak

Posted
Posted
Just one to be careful of folks. We were using ParentPay through our old caterers so they used to get invoiced by ParentPay and we linked it to our systems. We changed our caterer and payment system to something else now ParentPay have invoiced us for a 3 year contract costing about £4,000 and they won't budge on letting us out of it.

 

Admittedly I guess we could of made sure this wasn't going to end up falling back on us when we changed catering companies but having never had to pay for it or sign any invoices to suddenly get one... bit of a shock...more of a shock is how absolutely out of order they are being about it.

From memory there's a 3 month notice period to be wary of too
  • 6 months later...
supportman

supportman

Posted
Posted (edited)

Some new info has just come out about Sims NG. Doesn't look very exciting though, basically just a web page for taking registers....

 

SIMS Next Gen: what's available now - SIMS Next Gen (wistia.net)

Edited by supportman
FragglePete

FragglePete

Posted
Posted
Some new info has just come out about Sims NG. Doesn't look very exciting though, basically just a web page for taking registers....

 

SIMS Next Gen: what's available now - SIMS Next Gen (wistia.net)

 

Good God, their still harking on about their £40million investment. Enough already! You old, slow, outdated and nobody wants it anymore. This 'web' frontend is essentially what Edulink One is already - writing registers back to a SIMS database.

 

Pete

  • Thanks 1
synaesthesia

synaesthesia

Posted
Posted
Good God, their still harking on about their £40million investment. Enough already! You old, slow, outdated and nobody wants it anymore. This 'web' frontend is essentially what Edulink One is already - writing registers back to a SIMS database.

 

Pete

 

It does make you wonder, if that's what £40m buys you when Edulink is a comparatively tiny outfit, competing with and beating most similar providers and they all work better than SIMS's own offerings.

Frankly SIMS might just do better to feed a couple of parameters into chatGPT and let AI do the work for them. Cost them under a tenner, and a rough saving of £39,999,90!

ASA-Simon

ASA-Simon

Posted
Posted

I think the comparison with Edulink is generous. I can do far more in Edulink than I can in SIMS Next Gen.

 

Development feels incredibly slow. At this rate it will be years before they have anything close to what the other cloud based MIS are offering.

 

I see they are finally testing a proper homepage with a few schools. It looks very basic at the moment it's just a bunch of tiles that link to the different modules.

supportman

supportman

Posted
Posted

SIMS Next Gen: Why we chose Take Register - SIMS Next Gen (wistia.net)

 

This video shows you everything that is wrong really with their development strategy (and a few things that are right). A pretty long presentation on how they built a (MVP) for taking registers.

 

I mean I'm all up for analyzing data, getting feedback, and building something cool...

 

But then they say stuff like they got feedback that they needed mobile functionality. I mean these days EVERYTHING should be built mobile first, getting feedback is good, but it seems pretty obvious to me that all devices should just work out of the box. Responsive websites have been a thing for a long time now.

 

Then after that they start talking about working with Sims 7 and that Sims 7 is the master source of data. So actually the registers NG is "Bi-Directional synchronization". Bad idea!

 

And after that its all about Sims hosted, Sims local, Sims NG and the differences which they need to design for. Sounds so complicated and just a terrible way to develop a product backwards.

  • Thanks 3
richmackie

richmackie

Posted
Posted
So SIMS Connected is really just SIMS as we know it, but hosted by ESS? Lads, you've been working on this for 10 years and you haven't even changed the home page.
enjay

enjay

Posted
Posted
I think the comparison with Edulink is generous. I can do far more in Edulink than I can in SIMS Next Gen.

 

Development feels incredibly slow. At this rate it will be years before they have anything close to what the other cloud based MIS are offering.

 

Same here with ClassCharts and a bit of Go4Schools, most of our staff never touch SIMS. SIMS is predominantly a data source for the tools we actually use!

PotNoodleTech

PotNoodleTech

Posted
Posted
So SIMS Connected is really just SIMS as we know it, but hosted by ESS? Lads, you've been working on this for 10 years and you haven't even changed the home page.

 

Basically - it's a website front page which links to a bunch of remote desktops.

 

I.e it is not cloud based so if you are going to tender on CLOUD MIS's then sims connected should not even make the shortlist.

  • Thanks 4

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