Advanced Learning geting rid of cloud school by August

[k-strider]

just had this email - gonna be abusy few months for alot of us

 

Hello Gordon,
 
We are writing to inform you about an important change regarding our Cloud School product and its support.

Last year we wrote to you to share that we would be scaling back our development effort around Cloud School. After much consideration and following a strategic review of our product portfolio, we have subsequently decided to end-of-life Cloud School. We understand that this news may come as a disappointment, and we want to assure you that this decision was not made lightly. Since our original announcement many customers have already chosen to move to an alternative provider meaning the product is no longer commercially viable for us to continue to maintain and support.

Your access to Cloud School and its support will continue until 31 August 2023 enabling you to plan a migration to an alternative supplier of your choice. Our Support Team will work closely with you to ensure this process is as smooth as possible with minimal disruption.

From 1 March, our Cloud School Support Team will prioritise and focus on helping our customers migrate to their chosen solution. For all other support needs our telephone support line will be closed and we will move to ‘portal-only’ for initial case logging – you can access the support portal online. After 31 August 2023, our Support Team will no longer be available to provide technical assistance, software & security updates, or any bug fixes and Cloud School will no longer be accessible to users. Click here to read our Frequently Asked Questions document.

We will contact you shortly to discuss your next steps based on your current contract/renewal situation.

We strongly recommend that you start making plans to migrate to an alternative solution now. Whilst we fully appreciate this may not be news you were expecting, we do thank you for your understanding and for being a valued customer of Cloud School. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by raising a support ticket in the Customer Community Portal.


Doug Hargrove

[DODICT]

Any news if this will extend to CMIS/Facility schools too ?

[gaz350b]

Yup effects us, already got initial calls booked with various leading suppliers!

[Ditto]

Missed this on the day. I'm not surprised, but my old school will be in a bit of a flap. Hopefully they don't slip back to SIMS. I expect that any power MIS users ought not book Summer holidays!

[gaz350b]

Just to stick the knife in they are also emailing customers to extend their contracts to end of august if their contract finishes before this date.

[Ditto]

Just to stick the knife in they are also emailing customers to extend their contracts to end of august if their contract finishes before this date.

I wonder how those who had contracts beyond the August date - breach of contract litigation anyone? It's a while back, but I think the general contract dealt with this, so I guess all of the schools have to just plough on with a move. I'm not sure the analysis @bringmoredata does ever split Progresso/Cloud School versus Facility, but would be interesting to know the split and numbers.

[DODICT]

I wonder how those who had contracts beyond the August date - breach of contract litigation anyone? It's a while back, but I think the general contract dealt with this, so I guess all of the schools have to just plough on with a move. I'm not sure the analysis @bringmoredata does ever split Progresso/Cloud School versus Facility, but would be interesting to know the split and numbers.

 

From summer census (they lost some since but not got full date for the autumn census) it was 112 on progresso, 74 on Facilitybut I'm still hearing mixed stories on if Facility (CMIS) is also being EOL but presumably they have a little more grace up to Autumn census if needed but for Cloud school users thats not available from the 01/09.

[k-strider]

where did you get this information from just curious as we are having to pick a new one and it would be intresting to see what sort of usage the ones we are looking at have... 112 is really low i can see why they are droping it.

[MW_NetSupport]

You can see a breakdown of the number of schools MIS vendors have here https://www.edtechcentral.uk/mis/

[DODICT]

You can see a breakdown of the number of schools MIS vendors have here https://www.edtechcentral.uk/mis/

There is a good summary here too - https://bringmoredata.blogspot.com/ - neither of these sources break by Facility and Progresso though right ? If you request the version number in the FOI you can distinguish as progresso is in the version number. There is a request on Whatdotheyknow from Summer census with this info in.

Edited March 8, 2023 by DODICT

[k-strider]

Has anyone used the Governments G-Cloud 12 Framework before we are probably going to use it as the base for our procurment of an MIS as the ones we are looking at are all on the list.... ive just never done it before we have Used Crown Comercial services LOT1 for photocopiers before but that was single provider and we didnt have to do the process of selection.

[Ditto]

Has anyone used the Governments G-Cloud 12 Framework before we are probably going to use it as the base for our procurment of an MIS as the ones we are looking at are all on the list.... ive just never done it before we have Used Crown Comercial services LOT1 for photocopiers before but that was single provider and we didnt have to do the process of selection.

I haven't but other discussions suggest it is a good way to avoid litigation risk if your competitive procurement processes aren't 100% up to scratch.

[k-strider]

Anyone Cloudschool looking at how to export data that wont nesacerraly get migrated over to their new MIS i was thinking particualry we have reports that are PDFs attached to the students that parents or students login to review there could be a few over the years. the other thing i was thinking about is historical attendance data? we dont use it for behaviour so not worried about that.

[Ditto]

Anyone Cloudschool looking at how to export data that wont nesacerraly get migrated over to their new MIS i was thinking particualry we have reports that are PDFs attached to the students that parents or students login to review there could be a few over the years. the other thing i was thinking about is historical attendance data? we dont use it for behaviour so not worried about that.

I was expecting this one to come. My time with progress involved a lot of attached documents - we used it for termly and annual reports, plus enabled parents to view these - but the details are a little foggy for me. I think it would be a great question for another supplier as to how they handle. From my distant memory, it wasn't easy to pull them out in a meaningful way. Whether there is an SSRS route I'm not sure, but maybe there is another way - ultimately I guess they are stored as BLOBs or similar, but part of the challenge is building an index key that the recipient database can work with that retains the link to the migrate pupil and maintains chronology.

 

Sorry I couldn't be of more specific help.

[Ditto]

Out of interest, are any of the schools on here that are impacted, looking to pull in contract or consultancy services to assist with the migration?

[gaz350b]

Out of interest, are any of the schools on here that are impacted, looking to pull in contract or consultancy services to assist with the migration?

 

We've considered external support but mainly because we would probably need it with SIMS anyway.

[Ditto]

Just wondering how the progresso (Cloud school) migrations are getting on?

[Michael]

I've been involved with two migrations from Progresso > Arbor. Advanced require your nominated supplier to connect to Progresso via the API and download all the data this way. Arbor did an excellent job, especially with the high volume of schools they're now migrating.

[gaz350b]

I've been involved with two migrations from Progresso > Arbor. Advanced require your nominated supplier to connect to Progresso via the API and download all the data this way. Arbor did an excellent job, especially with the high volume of schools they're now migrating.

 

We moved to sims connected migration is pretty much complete although it was all spreadsheets (3 schools wasn’t fun at all) I was hoping we would choose arbour because of their API extraction method!

Lots of back filling of data will need to be done. Exclusion, All staff contracts(these don’t migrate), student attendance and staff absences from after the extraction date.

Setting up sims IDs has been a bit of a shit show tbh. We have a lot of staff that work the 3 schools. By the time we got to the 3rd school the engineer did set it all up his side for me importing all our multi site users! As we have to invite them. They accept the invite. We then have to accept their accepted invite. Then we can assign sims access and link to their sims account within sims…..

[Michael]

I'd say comparatively the Arbor migration was seamless with SSO with 365 from the start, however post migration there's still a lot of housekeeping for administrative personnel.

[marshall_wave]

Why on earth did you choose SIMS, Gaz?

[gaz350b]

Not my call obviously.

[k-strider]

We chose Bromcom and there has been lots of Exports via Reports they got Advanced to write, and a lot of manipulation of spreadsheets and setup in bromcom. CTF export and imports we are getting there its been a lot of work but i do like the look of BromCom. I know our DeputyHead (Data) has wanted to move MIS for a while but every time they though about it though again because of the work involved so in some ways it was nice to have our hand forced. We ran through the G Cloud framework to chose and it was a real close call in the end between Arbor and Bromcom to the point i sat on the fense and let the Leadership make the final call. Ive got Some systems like Parentpay and Groupcall Xportor allready migrated and will do Wonde and Cahsless the week after we break up and add the final bits of attendance data and medical events as we are using cloudschool uptill the end of term which for us is 2 weeks today!

[Ditto]

I do wonder if any schools haven't picked up that the product will be switched off shortly. I'd hope Advanced are pro-active with any that haven't indicated migration to date.

[Ditto]

In the 3 year SIMS contract thread there is a post that includes a link to BringMoreData info about MIS market share. See https://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/224774-ess-sims-3-year-contracts-68.html#post2019431

 

The data suggests there are 51 schools reporting that they are still using Progresso. I didn't think that was an option - has anyone more insight to the situation?