Arbor or Bromcom

[psynegy]

This this and this.

We spent literally months housekeeping SIMS before our migration: we moved to Bromcom in Feb half term but worked on SIMS tidying on and off for the whole of the Autumn Term.

It really helped, and the migration in terms of data was very smooth. We had a big migration document which tells you exactly which data fields in SIMS are moved and where they end up, and this was invaluable.

 

We plan to start our data tidy as soon as possible, before even having decided between Bromcom/Arbor. Do you have any advice on where to start with data tidying? What are the things that took the most time?

 

 

On a separate question - we've heard that neither MIS is very capable when it comes to timetabling, and a 3rd party been mentioned a few times. Is this a universal issue with these MIS's in secondaries?

[Linfit]

I would focus on contacts - getting rid of duplicates, any unlinked, this took us ages and you need a special report running to show all the potential duplicate contacts in the system, we got it from our support unit.

We found a lot of contacts were not entered correctly, so for example "Grandma" would have a phone number entered under the contact details of mum or dad rather than being a separate contact in the system.

There is no bulk editing of these so its very time consuming to edit them.

 

Making sure that all the right boxes are ticked on the contacts details - whether the phone number is mobile or not, who has parental responsibility etc. Some of those fields were not that significant to us as we did not use Intouch and had 3rd party add ins for comms, but we found that Bromcom was very particular about them, so won't send texts to a number that is not marked as a mobile number, will not e-mail out reports unless the Pupil Reports box is ticked, and things like that which in our SIMS setup didn['t matter as all that was dealt with via Edulink.

 

As for timetabling, I am the timetabler here and we have stuck with Nova. We thought the Bromcom e-timetabler was limited compared to Nova, and didn't meet our needs. I think if you are using Nova or Timetabler it might be best to stick with them (I am not sure Arbor even has a timetabling solution suitable for secondaries). Bromcom are re-writing theirs and making it web based and it looks promising but I think it might not be there for doing next years timetable.