Recommendations for new MIS

[mswart]

We are thinking of moving to new MIS, any recommendations, please. Native cloud solution for independant schools.

[slugshead]

My old school was international, we used iSAMS. Didn't have any complaints about it at all.

 

Be warned though, they've been bought by IRIS and I suspect that they're going to push their own version...

[RLR]

We just moved from SIMS to iSAMS as an independant school. There isn't many options to choose from when it comes to independany schools as most MISs are tailored towards state schools. It was a big project for us to move and involved a lot of people. We also had very limited time to do it as we wanted it done before SIMS locked us into a three year contract. With any MIS move I think there will be some rough patches along the way but now it's up and running we find it really good. A lot of changes in the way people work as SIMS and iSAMs are very different.

[TechMonkey]

I've had iSAMS in 2 schools now. Moving from any old school MIS it is head and shoulders above them. In my opinion it is a good system. My only annoyance is they need to pull their finger out on some major updating of modules, some things have been coming soon for a long time. But I think COVID and being taken over knocked their roadmap out. Things have started picking up and these are extra functionality rather than missing features.

I've not noticed any major issues since IRIS took over.

[2ilent8cho]

We moved from SIMS to iSAMS in 2017 , very happy with iSAMS, the fact its 100% web based and has Teacher, Student and Parent apps is great.

[dhicks]

We are thinking of moving to new MIS, any recommendations, please. Native cloud solution for independant schools.

 

Another school using iSAMS here. I don't use it on a day-to-day basis much myself, but I have been quite impressed with the API and the number of integrations with external applications available.

[KK20]

isams gets a negative vote from me. Their support is shocking. So far since the start of term ive submitted 5 tickets. *NONE* have been solved, in the end I scripted my own fix. I escalated a complaint two weeks ago and still haven't heard back from them despite requesting an update weekly. I have an email from their support for the first ticket I sent (a postcode checking error), the update after three weeks read "sorry we are taking our time, we have just taken on another 200 schools so our support is very busy". Classy. I have another email chain that has this very support ping pong spread over a week and a half - "sending to technical support", "escalating to business support", "sending to technical support", "escalating to technical support". Helpful. I had a 500 error for a product license error, that one was unresolved for a whole month, this meant we couldn't export anything to excel, which doesn't help for those functions that can ONLY export to excel. The data export errors in the pupil reporting module I fixed by using a homebrew API to CSV c# program, that ticket is still unresolved (coming up to a month). PArent portal has been moved to FireFly and communications is now with schoolpost.

 

If you require full access to your data you need to push for database access. The paid for API module will not give all the data back to you, notable absence is anything that isnt current - the API wont pull back staff or pupils who have left amongst other things. The inbuilt reporting is very lightweight and cannot access all the data. You can get custom reports written for you but they cost quite a bit even with their report plan. It used to be much easier in the SSRS days

 

If you do go with isams, make sure you get all the modules you need up front so you can get all the training with them, this costs quite a bit later on if you chop and change.

 

In short, the product is ok, the support is ridiculous. I have the green light to start looking for alternatives and are exploring as we speak.

Edited December 5, 2022 by KK20