Hosted Sims - Your latest thoughts please

[msi_school]

I get your point but when staff have been used to Sims for donkeys years then re-training them to a new MIS can be a challenge.

 

I have found that staff who have been using an MIS for years actually don't know how it use it to it fullest efficiency and by changing MIS and forcing training improvements are found across the school

[ITGURU]

based on readings of sims connected issues this week which is not surprising, ive informed our trust we will not be moving any time soon. its just another external service where everyone will come running asking you when it will be resolved and out of your control. what's wrong will local data locally managed and 100%, control over availability. same with any service.

[Edu-IT]

Are those having issues on the ParentPay infrastructure or the older ESS one?

[gaz350b]

Ours is the newer I believe these are the connected02.sims rds servers. The thing is it’s not just the backend that has problems sometimes it’s the front end authentication for sims ID.

 

This comes under massive pressure due to it serving parents as well trying to get in the parent app.

[Jamman960]

Has much changed in the world of Sims in the last year and a half? Having migrated my current school across to Engage I’m now going to a school using sims again 😭 guessing Sims 8/Next Gen have progressed as much as ever

[Edu-IT]

Has much changed in the world of Sims in the last year and a half? Having migrated my current school across to Engage I’m now going to a school using sims again [emoji24] guessing Sims 8/Next Gen have progressed as much as ever

There have been a lot of changes with NextGen which is being rolled out module by module. It certainly isn’t at a standstill. But it’s nowhere near finished.

[gaz350b]

Tbf after last weeks **** show general performance has been much improved (sessions seem snappier even compared to in the summer) lower latency on mouse and much higher screen refresh today.

 

There were some longer than acceptable login times this morning but it’s been a lot better.

 

After coming from progresso… NextGen just like sims7. Lack of joined up thinking everything is hosted on separate domains http://www.home.sims.co.Uk for example is one of them. Not sure I like it’s mobile/tablet 1st style.

 

Time will tell.

Edited September 17, 2023 by Dos_Box
Edited for swearing

[Damon]

From what I can see, next gen is mostly a read only platform where they've pulled data through the Sims management services and then dressed it up with a basic front end. That's the really easy bit. Developing functionality that actually allows you to record data and then have that written back or synchronised with your Sims server without issues is going to be the difficult grind.

 

Yes they have done this with attendance marks, maybe the odd element here and there but the more data there is going back and forth, the more issues will crop up. Sims just isn't designed to work like this from the ground up. It's going to need a huge shift in fundamental back end design to be something that can compete with the other cloud options on the market.

 

If you want cloud, just look at the alternative systems that have been doing it for years.

[supportman]

From what I can see, next gen is mostly a read only platform where they've pulled data through the Sims management services and then dressed it up with a basic front end. That's the really easy bit. Developing functionality that actually allows you to record data and then have that written back or synchronised with your Sims server without issues is going to be the difficult grind.

 

Yes they have done this with attendance marks, maybe the odd element here and there but the more data there is going back and forth, the more issues will crop up. Sims just isn't designed to work like this from the ground up. It's going to need a huge shift in fundamental back end design to be something that can compete with the other cloud options on the market.

 

If you want cloud, just look at the alternative systems that have been doing it for years.

 

It will never work... and anyone who thinks building a "cloud layer" over a 30 year old piece of obsolete software is a good design choice really is deluded.

 

They had the chance to start again with a clean modern stack then migrate customers 1-by-1, but they chose to prolong the pain and trap customers into long contracts instead.

[jthompson]

Quite a few responses here are basically recommending to migrate away from SIMS to a properly cloudy alternative.

 

However, if a school has decided, for whatever reason, to continue with SIMS, then I can't really see any compelling reason to stick with classic on-prem SIMS over SIMS Connected.

 

No, it's not really a proper cloud offering, but it is SaaS. And it gets responsibility for that database off your hands.

 

As someone who has stared into the abyss of a catastrophic loss of a SIMS server on more than one occasion (once to hardware failure and once to ransomware), I will happily trade a few weeks of flakey service during the year and some fairly minor manual user provisioning for being able to sleep at night and not having to run, maintain and back up a 20GB SQL database and its host system.

 

And whilst SOLUS did actually work okay for us, I'm delighted to never again have to deploy or upgrade 200+ SIMS clients ever again.

[DrCheese]

I totally disagree - I'm not going to inflict a substandard service on my users that I have zero control over just to make my life easier by not having it on-prem.

Our job is to provide our users with a reliable service, not cut corners that don't need to be cut & pass the buck (It's not even that, given that we make the decisions so are still responsible for it - Users dealing with the rubbish service would ask us why & blame us for choosing it)

 

Nor am I going to hand over my database to ESS who will no doubt fight tooth and nail to avoid giving us it back when we want to migrate to a proper solution.

Edited September 16, 2023 by DrCheese

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Quite a few responses here are basically recommending to migrate away from SIMS to a properly cloudy alternative.

 

However, if a school has decided, for whatever reason, to continue with SIMS, then I can't really see any compelling reason to stick with classic on-prem SIMS over SIMS Connected.

 

No, it's not really a proper cloud offering, but it is SaaS. And it gets responsibility for that database off your hands.

 

As someone who has stared into the abyss of a catastrophic loss of a SIMS server on more than one occasion (once to hardware failure and once to ransomware), I will happily trade a few weeks of flakey service during the year and some fairly minor manual user provisioning for being able to sleep at night and not having to run, maintain and back up a 20GB SQL database and its host system.

 

And whilst SOLUS did actually work okay for us, I'm delighted to never again have to deploy or upgrade 200+ SIMS clients ever again.

 

 

Speaking as one of the Trusts that is tied into SIMS till 2025 we had no choice but to come out of connected and back on premise. Whilst I can understand where you are coming from, our experience of connected over 12 months was worse than just flakey. Consistently over the year, week after week, month after month, the system would just stop working. Every day we would be bombaeded with helpdesk tickets for users that could logon yesterday but not today. Despite reassurances of technical upgrades this never actually translated into improvements for the user. In all my years in education I have never known so many issues with SIMS logons and it was totally unmanageable. So many frustrations for the users as the internal team could do literally nothing and ESS support was useless. No real acknowledgement of scale of the problem just a temporary outage that would be fixed soon. Our account manager was sick of me complaining day after day. This caused us so many problems to the point where more 3rd party products were used as staff simply couldn’t get onto sims reliably to do a register, to ask for on-call or to run reports.

 

Certainly not happy that we now have to manage SIMS servers - SOLUS 3 is still terrible especially across 1200 clients, but bringing it back in house was an urgent safeguarding concern. We are now starting a Trust wide review of the market to determine whether SIMS is the right product for us going forward.

[DrCheese]

They had the chance to start again with a clean modern stack then migrate customers 1-by-1, but they chose to prolong the pain and trap customers into long contracts instead.

 

Thing is, the long contracts thing doesn't even really work - All of their competitors have just adjusted for it & offer massive discounts/write off the first few years. So they've peeved off their customer base for... what? People who were happy to just tick it by yearly are now actively angrily looking for alternative solutions.

 

So many frustrations for the users as the internal team could do literally nothing and ESS support was useless.

 

Yeah, this is what I was referring to in my previous post - Dumping SIMS on the cloud just to avoid running an on-prem solution does not make the IT Departments' lives easier at all.

It makes it much harder as it's not reliable and the users only have you they can scream at. They will blame you & their perception of you providing a well-run IT service will dwindle - Which of course is unfair but people will just say "Well our IT setup is naff, we can't even do our registers!" to others.

 

It's not like when we all migrated on-site mail servers to 365/Gmail - Because those are proven, reliable systems that offered significant advantages over the on-prem setup. This is anything but.

Edited September 17, 2023 by DrCheese

[supportman]

Speaking as one of the Trusts that is tied into SIMS till 2025......

 

Certainly not happy that we now have to manage SIMS servers - SOLUS 3 is still terrible especially across 1200 clients, but bringing it back in house was an urgent safeguarding concern. We are now starting a Trust wide review of the market to determine whether SIMS is the right product for us going forward.

 

Definitely look into the alternatives, as the reply above states you can get huge discounts from new MIS's if you are tied to a Sims contract. An MIS move at any time should be cost neutral with the big players.

 

I'm loving Bromcom simply being Single-Sign-on with Office 365 logins, staff just click a button and they are in. No credential problems ever.

[jthompson]

I totally disagree - I'm not going to inflict a substandard service on my users that I have zero control over just to make my life easier by not having it on-prem.

Our job is to provide our users with a reliable service, not cut corners that don't need to be cut & pass the buck (It's not even that, given that we make the decisions so are still responsible for it - Users dealing with the rubbish service would ask us why & blame us for choosing it)

 

Nor am I going to hand over my database to ESS who will no doubt fight tooth and nail to avoid giving us it back when we want to migrate to a proper solution.

 

I guess it hangs on whether the SIMS Connected service is problematic every day, or just on the odd occasion. So far for us it's been the latter, so the service here for end users is generally better than when it was when on prem (no client upgrades, offsite/onsite experience works the same for them) and it opens the door for us to deploy Chromebooks to teaching staff. If it were the former, then yes, the calculus would admittedly be quite different. I guess the true picture for us here will only emerge over time.

 

Your point about sovereignty over the database is an interesting one. How do migrations to different MIS providers generally work? Are they a matter of "send us a copy of your SQL Server db files please" or can they leverage some kind of sync agent?

[supportman]

How do migrations to different MIS providers generally work? Are they a matter of "send us a copy of your SQL Server db files please" or can they leverage some kind of sync agent?

 

Yes when we moved to Bromcom, we just sent them the our Sims SQL database and they migrated all our data within a few days. We ran it in parallel for a few months to check everything then sent them a 2nd copy of the SQL the day before official change over.

 

Giving EES control of your database in their cloud, seems like a yet another barrier to migration.

[PotNoodleTech]

and it opens the door for us to deploy Chromebooks to teaching staff.

 

Out of interest have you tried this? Is it just going to a website or would you need to use an RDP client on the chromebook?

 

Thanks

[jthompson]

Out of interest have you tried this? Is it just going to a website or would you need to use an RDP client on the chromebook?

 

Thanks

 

Yes, it works. It's all done via an HTML5 RDP client, so no extra extensions or anything needed on client devices. File uploads/downloads and printing also works just as it does on a Windows device.

[PotNoodleTech]

Yes, it works. It's all done via an HTML5 RDP client, so no extra extensions or anything needed on client devices. File uploads/downloads and printing also works just as it does on a Windows device.

 

Nice! We're talking about SIMS Connected yeh? (as opposed to "next gen")

 

That would be a big bonus for us as we already have staff Chromebooks.

 

I am just distinctly worried about the tales of unreliability that seem to have been a consistent theme over the years.

[jthompson]

Nice! We're talking about SIMS Connected yeh? (as opposed to "next gen")

 

That would be a big bonus for us as we already have staff Chromebooks.

 

I am just distinctly worried about the tales of unreliability that seem to have been a consistent theme over the years.

 

Yes, SIMS Connected. SIMS ID also supports signing in using existing Google or MS accounts. We're using Google accounts, so that once up and running nobody needs to remember any SIMS ID creds. Those SIMS ID creds do remain active, though, even if using one of the SSO mechanisms, so will still need to be kept secure.

 

We've only been using the service since the summer half term, and whilst there have been a few issues during that time (the first week of September was a bit painful), there's nothing yet that giving us any cause to think that we might want to revert back to on-prem SIMS. Obviously, other contributors here have described longer/different experiences with it than that.

[DrCheese]

I guess it hangs on whether the SIMS Connected service is problematic every day, or just on the odd occasion. So far for us it's been the latter, so the service here for end users is generally better than when it was when on prem (no client upgrades, offsite/onsite experience works the same for them) and it opens the door for us to deploy Chromebooks to teaching staff. If it were the former, then yes, the calculus would admittedly be quite different. I guess the true picture for us here will only emerge over time.

 

Aye fair enough & I apologise if came across as aggressive/grumpy in my comments. I think I'm just really jaded by how ESS have treat customers over the past few years & it's rubbed off.

 

Your point about sovereignty over the database is an interesting one. How do migrations to different MIS providers generally work? Are they a matter of "send us a copy of your SQL Server db files please" or can they leverage some kind of sync agent?

 

Haven't done one yet myself, but from speaking to colleagues elsewhere (& the other posters) you just send the new vendor a copy of your DB, they then train your staff on your actual data & then do a final copy again before swapping over.

 

I'm just extremely wary of ESS and how they've abused their position over the past year that I wouldn't put it past them to come up with some nonsense expensive fee to get your data back in a readable format to import into another system.

The CMA really had an opportunity to clamp down on their awful behaviour but chose to walk away, so ESS are likely to continue to come up with any excuse they can to extract money.

[databird]

Moving to a different MIS is being discussed. I am a data manager with no responsibility for the hosting/running of SIMs, just using and manipulating the data. Over the years I have built whole swathes of marksheets and reports bespoke to what we need here. Can any of that be migrated along with the data? For eg from SIMs to Bromcom? Our admin staff would literally resign if we had to rebuild all out 'tools'

[supportman]

Moving to a different MIS is being discussed. I am a data manager with no responsibility for the hosting/running of SIMs, just using and manipulating the data. Over the years I have built whole swathes of marksheets and reports bespoke to what we need here. Can any of that be migrated along with the data? For eg from SIMs to Bromcom? Our admin staff would literally resign if we had to rebuild all out 'tools'

 

Probably not, but our data manager had similar concerns and now we can't keep her away from Quick reports and Power Bi and the analysis it can do. Its all drag and drop stuff.

 

What you find when you move away from Sims is that a lot of the old hacks that are done, simply aren't needed any more as the MIS does it automatically.

Edited September 26, 2023 by supportman

[AlistairB1983]

Probably not, but our data manager had similar concerns and now we can't keep her away from Power Bi and the analysis it can do. Its all drag and drop stuff.

What you find when you move away from Sims is that a lot of the old hacks that are done, simply aren't needed any more as the MIS does it automatically.

As someone who is a Data Manager and has gone from SIMS to Arbor back to SIMS (and hopefully back to Arbor in the next 6 months or so) over my last three schools, I will attest to the above.

 

What you'll find is the majority of the data that staff wanted will be much more easily downloadable/readable within the MIS itself, compared to the archaic reporting system within SIMS. The only thing some staff will need to accept is that the reports produced may not look exactly the same as they did via SIMS, but even this is becoming less and less of an issue as the new MIS's are - unlike SIMS - continuing to offer updates and changes to their software, meaning more and more features are becoming available to users.

 

As to whether specific reports are transferable, I don't believe so directly but the new MIS provider will, I'm sure, be more than happy to sit down with admin staff and help design the new (and improved) versions of said reports.

 

TL;DR - the same data will continue to be available, but staff may just need to adapt to how this is found. But once they have done so, their lives will be immeasurably better.

[msi_school]

 

As to whether specific reports are transferable, I don't believe so directly but the new MIS provider will, I'm sure, be more than happy to sit down with admin staff and help design the new (and improved) versions of said reports.

 

TL;DR - the same data will continue to be available, but staff may just need to adapt to how this is found. But once they have done so, their lives will be immeasurably better.

 

If you are unlucky you will find out first hand why so many large IT projects go over budget as everyone tries have their favorite report and process replicated in the new MIS.