SIMS connected (avoid like the plague)

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Evening all,

 

Just a word of caution although I’m sure most in the community will be well aware.

 

Avoid SIMS connected (the rebrand of hosted SIMS) at all costs.

 

Our Trust moved across over summer and has had nothing but major issues this week - it is best summarised as a disaster.

 

Long story short it seems the connected platform is woefully underpowered and doesn’t have enough server resource on its RDP sessions to allow users to connect reliably.

 

The support is also shocking.. tomorrow will be day 4 of 50% of our staff being unable to logon and use sims.

 

Avoid avoid avoid.

[free780]

It’s not the first vendor I’ve heard of using their “cloud service” just hosting a RDP farm. I best it’s a lot more expensive than on prem servers.

[mitchell1981]

Having exactly the same experience.

 

Barely working the last two days.

Users constantly disconnecting.

Some can’t log in at all.

Having to ‘re sync’ passwords for the same users over and over again.

 

Have now told teachers to use Edulink for registers instead.

[3s-gtech]

Same. Luckily we don’t use it for registers, and I haven’t rolled out access to all staff yet to scale it up.

 

The install on the TPC works fine, so the DB backend is okay. The RDP muscle is woeful.

 

I’m trying to script as much as I can to avoid it, like student timetables outputs, but when we need an address or phone number…

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We are 8 secondaries and 1 AP - £25k a year. Could have ran it better ourselves for that amount. Really frustrated as decision was made prior to me taking up post and contracts signed. Let’s hope today is better.

[markberry]

I can't believe they are even trying to sell this as a cloud solution! It's app publishing using RDP. We can implement this ourselves and it won't cost a penny!

[supportman]

Why on earth would anyone choose a RDP solution over pure cloud? I just don't understand that decision.

 

Saying that, some full cloud providers are having issues today. Hopefully resolved now but still...

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Day 4 and same issues are continuing!

 

As you say it's just HTML5 RD web access that we could provide better ourselves.. only sort of bonus I would say from having ran this previously interanlly is they have added a third party product to RD web for upload and download of files to the hosted server... and that's me trying to find one thing thats OK!

[donkeymusic]

Good Morning,

 

We are currently looking at SimS Connected, and just wondered if anyone else had any other feedback?

@JThornton are you still experiencing issues with it?

 

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks

[ThatBoringBloke]

Terrible product running on RDP on a terrible platform.

SIMS ID (The way they make you sign in) works sometimes, doesn't work others. Once in sometimes you can connect to the RD other times it just disconnects you. Its the same old on premises SIMS, hosted on a Windows Server 2012 RDP farm somewhere with what at times feel like a 1Mb Internet feed connecting it. Or maybe they just have a single server serving everyone?

 

We have sent numberous emails to ESS using phrases such as 'diabolical', 'shambolic', 'unfit for purpose'.

Even our DHT who made the decision has said its the worst one he's made in 30+ years.

 

EDIT: That said, no one's whinged yet this week.

Edited October 12, 2022 by ThatBoringBloke

[donkeymusic]

Thanks for that, anyone else, just looking for supporting evidence from schools who have made the change.

 

Anything positive about SIMS Connected?

[3s-gtech]

Our users are gradually getting used to it being awful. Conditioning in their low expectations.

 

What are the chances it'll still be on 2012 R2 after the end of support next October?

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We have just agreed with ESS to bring back in house as it’s not manageable for us. Too unreliable and the headaches are too much.

[Jaan]

Is SIMs Connected and SIMs Next gen the same thing then?

 

https://www.ess-sims.co.uk/products-and-services/sims-connected

 

https://www.ess-sims.co.uk/nextgen

[3s-gtech]

No. One is old SIMS over HTML5 RDP, one uses native web tech. Saying that, when they started on SIMS 8 I suspect ‘native’ was Macromedia Shockwave, with Realplayer instruction videos (yes, I know ESS didn’t exist until recently!)

[Jaan]

No. One is old SIMS over HTML5 RDP, one uses native web tech. Saying that, when they started on SIMS 8 I suspect ‘native’ was Macromedia Shockwave, with Realplayer instruction videos (yes, I know ESS didn’t exist until recently!)

 

LOL

 

I guess the next gen is pure Web browser based and a totally new product. Just i've not seen much about it.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Yes Next Gen is going to be fully web based. When I spoke to the higher ups they are prioritising areas of Sims that are most frequently used to try and get something put together quickly. We will wait and see! Capita was working on this for years and go nowhere.

 

SIMS connected was described to me as the “stop gap” until next Gen is ready.

 

I do feel sorry for ESS in a way as I suspect a large amount of schools who are still using SIMS.net are doing so because they are either scared of change or love the functionality and way it works for some bizarre reason. They are probably afraid of moving to another MIS and concerned whether it will work with all third party software… all of which will be concerns of the Next Gen product when/if it launches. So they will have an equally tough job I suspect of moving people over.

[supportman]

Yes Next Gen is going to be fully web based.

 

I think there is some kind of sync with a local SQL server though as well.

 

So much technical and historical baggage with Sims, well worth moving to a more modern MIS which doesn't have that.

[ConceroEdu_Brad]

Has anyone tried using Sims hosted in azure and then using Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for end user access. It leverages MFA from 365 to make it uber secure. We moved a school to this back in January - works really well. They use it for both sims and FMS. Most staff just run the web app and because its SSO (their devices are connected into AzureAD) its really easy for them.