[bromcom] Bromcom SSO Issue / Slowness

[Dr_Zeux]

So, today's problems - I found a problem yesterday and reported it to Bromcom, re: registers not working in the old UI giving an error message. Helpdesk confirmed it was a bug with the old UI and said if teachers choose the new UI, this wouldn't be an issue. I explained this to teachers, but they hate the new UI - much harder to navigate, cannot record behaviour easily and it leaves the register up as the default home screen - surely a bit of a GDPR issue!? Anyway, today, it seems when helpdesk replied to the ticket, they took it upon themselves to change MY SCHOOL'S system setting and 'force users to use the new UI' - no notification, or a request to change the setting, just a global change without my permission!!! Then, the teacher complaints started.... I can't even complain to customercare@ (customer lack of care) as they do not respond to emails! Anyone else having a nightmare with the new UI?

[supportman]

So, today's problems - I found a problem yesterday and reported it to Bromcom, re: registers not working in the old UI giving an error message. Helpdesk confirmed it was a bug with the old UI and said if teachers choose the new UI, this wouldn't be an issue. I explained this to teachers, but they hate the new UI - much harder to navigate, cannot record behaviour easily and it leaves the register up as the default home screen - surely a bit of a GDPR issue!? Anyway, today, it seems when helpdesk replied to the ticket, they took it upon themselves to change MY SCHOOL'S system setting and 'force users to use the new UI' - no notification, or a request to change the setting, just a global change without my permission!!! Then, the teacher complaints started.... I can't even complain to customercare@ (customer lack of care) as they do not respond to emails! Anyone else having a nightmare with the new UI?

The UI has been out for a while I think, you can set it in config >> systems settings >> Allow users to switch between new and old user interface

 

We had a few complaints at first but teachers got used to it. I really would recommend allowing teachers use the app though on their phones, works much quicker and streamlines the registration process.

[Dr_Zeux]

The UI has been out for a while I think, you can set it in config >> systems settings >> Allow users to switch between new and old user interface

 

We had a few complaints at first but teachers got used to it. I really would recommend allowing teachers use the app though on their phones, works much quicker and streamlines the registration process.

 

Thanks - it might be worth considering, but our teachers currently don't use mobile devices in their classrooms... Though, I am aware of how I can set it for users to allow them to switch between new and old interface, Bromcom helpdesk actually configured it for my school to force users to use the new UI, without informing me! I'm sure you can see the issue of being forced to use the new UI, without being consulted...

[Dr_Zeux]

The UI has been out for a while I think, you can set it in config >> systems settings >> Allow users to switch between new and old user interface

 

We had a few complaints at first but teachers got used to it. I really would recommend allowing teachers use the app though on their phones, works much quicker and streamlines the registration process.

 

Just curious - do you have an Account Manager or CSM? And how long have you been with Bromcom for?

[supportman]

Just curious - do you have an Account Manager or CSM? And how long have you been with Bromcom for?

No account manager that I know of, we've had Bromcom since covid so pretty much bedded in now and doing what it should.

 

Staff are used to it and no real complaints on usability like you describe. As mentioned our teachers heavily use the app for registers and student lookups on their phones or iPads. Other than the speed and stability issues of recent times its been a great improvement.

 

To keep this on topic... I read their major outage investigation report of what happened on the first day of term. Not great planning changing their azure capacity so close to term start even if it was well intentioned, but at least they acknowledge it so hopefully won't happen again. Can't always blame Azure if you only give 48hrs to fix it!!

[Dr_Zeux]

No account manager that I know of, we've had Bromcom since covid so pretty much bedded in now and doing what it should.

 

Staff are used to it and no real complaints on usability like you describe. As mentioned our teachers heavily use the app for registers and student lookups on their phones or iPads. Other than the speed and stability issues of recent times its been a great improvement.

 

To keep this on topic... I read their major outage investigation report of what happened on the first day of term. Not great planning changing their azure capacity so close to term start even if it was well intentioned, but at least they acknowledge it so hopefully won't happen again. Can't always blame Azure if you only give 48hrs to fix it!!

 

I have zero faith it won't happen again - there have been so many outages in the last 2 years! Some don't even get onto the Bromcom status page... You are unbelievably optimistic Supportman! In the report of what happened, it says, "The change was approved for the early hours of Sunday 1st September." Why was this change approved in September at all!? It also says, "Microsoft have now confirmed in several statements to Bromcom that the issue was related to UK regional Azure issues that they experienced Monday 2nd September and resource allocation issues that they experienced Tuesday 3rd through to Thursday 5th September". Again, why were they adding resources between 3rd to 5th Sept!?

 

Having known how many new schools signed up (400+ from NI) back in Summer term, why weren't these changes requested and resources added then, well before the summer holidays? Why wait until beginning of Sept... I think that says something about the planning and the Chief Operating Officer's priorities...

Major Incident Root-Cause-Analysis 2nd-5th September 2024.pdf

[TheCookieMonster]

I have to agree with Supportman. We provision the use of IPADS in school so the teacher app can be used and this has been a real help.

 

Since taking on Bromcom the support has always been there when needed as well as the Community which is something Bromcom have stolen a march in the market on as we resolve so many queries on the community without needing to call the support team. It's ultimately a zero line support and saves so much time.

 

Some of our staff have been attending the daily drop-in sessions which they've gained so much from. Parents Evening time soon so we will see how it goes as we have moved on from our 3rd party provider to do it solely via Bromcom and the app.

 

The issues at the start of term were frustrating to say the least, but touch wood everything seems fine since.

[Dr_Zeux]

I have to agree with Supportman. We provision the use of IPADS in school so the teacher app can be used and this has been a real help.

 

Since taking on Bromcom the support has always been there when needed as well as the Community which is something Bromcom have stolen a march in the market on as we resolve so many queries on the community without needing to call the support team. It's ultimately a zero line support and saves so much time.

 

Some of our staff have been attending the daily drop-in sessions which they've gained so much from. Parents Evening time soon so we will see how it goes as we have moved on from our 3rd party provider to do it solely via Bromcom and the app.

 

The issues at the start of term were frustrating to say the least, but touch wood everything seems fine since.

 

Wow - your experience is so different from ours. Support has been mediocre with Bromcom - our first year was awful with both transitional and helpdesk support! More recently, they can't resolve our Virtual school issues and offer the wrong advice, last year we had a few cases for older than 6 months, and often don't resolve cases for 2+ weeks. We still have a case from last year open, which is now 1 years old! So, I can't say that i'm too impressed with their support - many of the cases I log require a software fix. Customer care is appalling. The MIS itself goes down, and has so many bugs/glitches on a regular basis! But thanks for the advice on the Community - I stayed away for so long as I had a different opinion about it, probably relating to Customer care, Helpdesk support, development ideas, and their poor comms, but i'll be glad to be proved wrong!

[Dr_Zeux]

Wow - your experience is so different from ours. Support has been mediocre with Bromcom - our first year was awful with both transitional and helpdesk support! More recently, they can't resolve our Virtual school issues and offer the wrong advice, last year we had a few cases for older than 6 months, and often don't resolve cases for 2+ weeks. We still have a case from last year open, which is now 1 years old! So, I can't say that i'm too impressed with their support - many of the cases I log require a software fix. Customer care is appalling. The MIS itself goes down, and has so many bugs/glitches on a regular basis! But thanks for the advice on the Community - I stayed away for so long as I had a different opinion about it, probably relating to Customer care, Helpdesk support, development ideas, and their poor comms, but i'll be glad to be proved wrong!

 

So you can all see that this is not just my views, here's a survey of over 1,000 schools:

 

 

https://thekeysupport.com/blog/what-do-schools-really-think-MIS-2023/

 

 

Though I appreciate Bromcom have been growing their resources since and development ideas have finally started to progress... I think their reputation has gone downhill in the last few years!

[psydii]

That is a very interesting set of data. I wish it were possible to apply filters so one could do a "schools like me" comparison, because for the other annual MIS study the picture moves quite dramatically when you (say) remove Primary-heavy MATs.

 

On feelings about integrations... based on reading 3rd party integration notes/options the one people feel is worst in this survey, seems to be the one that has the least caveats in the 3rd party docs. I wonder what is going on there? (Particularly since some of the MIS's with high satisfaction in this area I was under the impression don't actually offer much in the way of integrations). I continue to suspect part of the problem is higher exceptions from customers on customisation and thus greater disappointment when they encounter the limitations.

[Dr_Zeux]

No account manager that I know of, we've had Bromcom since covid so pretty much bedded in now and doing what it should.

 

Staff are used to it and no real complaints on usability like you describe. As mentioned our teachers heavily use the app for registers and student lookups on their phones or iPads. Other than the speed and stability issues of recent times its been a great improvement.

 

To keep this on topic... I read their major outage investigation report of what happened on the first day of term. Not great planning changing their azure capacity so close to term start even if it was well intentioned, but at least they acknowledge it so hopefully won't happen again. Can't always blame Azure if you only give 48hrs to fix it!!

 

Performance issues yesterday and again today - helpdesk just confirmed it. Is it on their status page!? Of course not....

[svelez]

So you can all see that this is not just my views, here's a survey of over 1,000 schools:

 

 

https://thekeysupport.com/blog/what-do-schools-really-think-MIS-2023/

 

 

Though I appreciate Bromcom have been growing their resources since and development ideas have finally started to progress... I think their reputation has gone downhill in the last few years!

Just as an FYI to everyone, The Key owns Arbor. If you read all the way to the end of the article, they also admit that the data is not weighted by provider. I took the time to weight the overall satisfaction graph, and you do get a different picture. It's unfortunate we don't have unbiased data on school MIS choices.

[Ditto]

Just as an FYI to everyone, The Key owns Arbor. If you read all the way to the end of the article, they also admit that the data is not weighted by provider. I took the time to weight the overall satisfaction graph, and you do get a different picture. It's unfortunate we don't have unbiased data on school MIS choices.

I did read all their disclosures and agree it would be more reassuring to have a completely independent review. How did you apply a weighting and do you mind publishing your results.

 

I also would have been interested in the data where there were less than 100 responses to get an insight on Advanced Learning, IRIS Ed:gen, iSAMS, Juniper Horizons, Pupil Asset, and SchoolPod. 100 seemed too high given only just over 1000 respondents in total.

[svelez]

Sure thing.

 

DISCLAIMER: I am not a statitician. This might be all wrong, so please do correct me where/if I'm wrong.

 

To weight the data, we have to know the proportion of respondents.

 

SIMS: 44.23%

Arbor: 19.13%

Integris: 14.33%

ScholarPack: 12.21%

Bromcom: 10.10%

 

Arbor has more respondents than Bromcom, so a comparison of the two isn't going to be completely fair without weighting. Answers will be disproportionately represented in the graphs.

 

To weight responses, you multiply the unweighted data by the proportion of responses. So Bromcom comes in at 8% extremely dissatisfied.

 

0.08 (8%) * 0.101 (10.1%) = 0.00808 (0.81%)

 

Arbor, unweighted is 1%.

 

0.01 (1%) * 0.1913 (19.13%) = 0.001913 (0.19%)

 

Here’s the graph when you weight the rest of the data this way:

 

Chart

 

In writing this up, I realised the first time around I did the weighting slightly wrong which produced bigger changes in the graph. The above is correct to my knowledge, and the differences are much more subtle. Hopefully helpful to anyone looking to change MIS who came across the data from The Key.

Edited September 26, 2024 by svelez

[synaesthesia]

And one big weight which is rarely taken into consideration, especially for the SIMS respondents is "people are happy because they don't know any different" - and frankly, that's not something you could possibly account for in any chart.

[d488z]

Hello, fellow Bromcom user... We have the exact same problem with the manage attendance page. We have a Ryzen 5 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11. It's the same issue with Edge and Chrome. No solution so far. We were doing all school but now reduced to doing year group at a time on the manage attendance page, (same thing happened in edge again)....going to contact Bromcom again!!

[themightymrp]

We are still having this attendance issue. Tried with Edge and Chrome, fails regularly. It is also now randomly saving attendance updates to other days i.e. our sixth form administrator updated one students attendance on Monday to an 'I' mark for illness. It seems to have duplicated that to today as well, even though only one day was highlighted. Obviously, not good! It shows the same time stamp on the register audit report.

 

Raised under ticket CAS-374458-K7R4F8

[Bromcom_Darren]

We are still having this attendance issue. Tried with Edge and Chrome, fails regularly. It is also now randomly saving attendance updates to other days i.e. our sixth form administrator updated one students attendance on Monday to an 'I' mark for illness. It seems to have duplicated that to today as well, even though only one day was highlighted. Obviously, not good! It shows the same time stamp on the register audit report.

 

Raised under ticket CAS-374458-K7R4F8

 

Thank you for providing your case number I will get this looked into asap.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

[SteveM555]

Hello, fellow Bromcom user... We have the exact same problem with the manage attendance page. We have a Ryzen 5 with 16GB RAM running Windows 11. It's the same issue with Edge and Chrome. No solution so far. We were doing all school but now reduced to doing year group at a time on the manage attendance page, (same thing happened in edge again)....going to contact Bromcom again!!

We get similar issues, manage attendance pages crashing Edge and Chrome with out of memory messages. Its the same on multiple PCs, even ours with 64GB ram, Ryzen 5800x machines. We've tried disabling the Chrome performance options, memory saver and looked at the obscure chrome flags to increase tab memory usage but nothing seems to work, and frankly shouldn't need to.

[themightymrp]

 

Wow! For machines in school!? Crazy

[SteveM555]

Wow! For machines in school!? Crazy

 

In the IT office yeah, attendance office PCs are i5/16GB ram, 512gb M.2's.

[kennysarmy]

Call opened with Bromcom 28 days ago:

 

O365 sync missing Owner when transferring classes

 

MEDIUM priority was selected when opening the ticket.

 

26 days ago I had the ONLY update to the ticket.

 

Thank you for logging your call, regarding O365 sync missing Owner when transferring classes.

 

We will look into the example provided and get back to you as soon as possible with an update.

 

Kind regards

 

Jackie

 

 

I've posted EIGHT replies to the ticket since, asking for updates, all ignored.

 

Great service Bromcom!

[supportman]

26 days for a reply to a support request is not acceptable....

 

It always makes me wonder why companies have priorities when logging calls. I mean if I log a request I want an answer preferably that day no matter what the urgency.

[Olliedawg]

Call opened with Bromcom 28 days ago:

 

O365 sync missing Owner when transferring classes

 

MEDIUM priority was selected when opening the ticket.

 

26 days ago I had the ONLY update to the ticket.

 

Thank you for logging your call, regarding O365 sync missing Owner when transferring classes.

 

We will look into the example provided and get back to you as soon as possible with an update.

 

Kind regards

 

Jackie

 

 

I've posted EIGHT replies to the ticket since, asking for updates, all ignored.

 

Great service Bromcom!

 

I've found that they barely respond to replies on the ticket. I just ring up now and ask for updates. You shouldn't have to, but thats how it is.

[BromcomMatt]

Call opened with Bromcom 28 days ago:

 

O365 sync missing Owner when transferring classes

 

MEDIUM priority was selected when opening the ticket.

 

26 days ago I had the ONLY update to the ticket.

 

Thank you for logging your call, regarding O365 sync missing Owner when transferring classes.

 

We will look into the example provided and get back to you as soon as possible with an update.

 

Kind regards

 

Jackie

 

 

I've posted EIGHT replies to the ticket since, asking for updates, all ignored.

 

Great service Bromcom!

Good afternoon. I am sorry to see you have this issue. Are you happy to share the case reference so we can have another look and get it escalated? O365 cases are tricky as we have no access or visibility to your tenancy that sits outside the MIS. There are the sync logs. We have a number of ways that we can help you resolve issues: contacting helpdesk, asking on the community (8000 strong), attending daily drop ins, booking a CSM call and escalating a support ticket via the customer care team. If you are share the ticket reference I will look at the case to try and resolve it or suggest a practical workaround, I hope that helps.