[sims] Sims to bromcom

[kevin_lane]

We are looking to potentially look more into moving to bromcom from sims

 

Would people be willing to provide their feelings and experience around this MIS and any pitfalls we should look out for

 

We are a secondary school with over 1400 pupils and over 200 staff

 

Also any costings would be great aswell

 

Thank you

[nicholab]

We are looking to potentially look more into moving to bromcom from sims

 

Would people be willing to provide their feelings and experience around this MIS and any pitfalls we should look out for

 

We are a secondary school with over 1400 pupils and over 200 staff

 

Also any costings would be great aswell

 

Thank you

 

Make sure you cloud hosted as updates are applied for you.

 

Key staff need to be trained

 

Key staff should be able to contact support directly.

 

Also SLT need to give staff enough time for support to help key staff.

 

An SLT lead needs to sponsor the project to get buy in.

 

Also it’s not your parents MIS it different!

 

You may need to make data exporters work differently.

Edited January 30, 2024 by nicholab

[drutt]

Make sure to put together a proper data archival plan, ESS has recently changed policies and you are no longer allowed to keep a local read-only copy of the SIMS or FMS software/databases once your current licence with them ends.

 

They have also implemented policy stating the BAK file contains their intellectual property so cannot be used to migrate data.

 

Guidance to customers extracting data from SIMS or FMS for the purpose of migration or data archive

[Ditto]

Make sure to put together a proper data archival plan, ESS has recently changed policies and you are no longer allowed to keep a local read-only copy of the SIMS or FMS software/databases once your current licence with them ends.

 

They have also implemented policy stating the BAK file contains their intellectual property so cannot be used to migrate data.

 

Guidance to customers extracting data from SIMS or FMS for the purpose of migration or data archive

 

Thanks for highlighting this. I think this could be big news for some on hear ,sufficiently big, I hope you don't mid, but I'm going to start a new thread.

[Dr_Zeux]

We are looking to potentially look more into moving to bromcom from sims

 

Would people be willing to provide their feelings and experience around this MIS and any pitfalls we should look out for

 

We are a secondary school with over 1400 pupils and over 200 staff

 

Also any costings would be great aswell

 

Thank you

 

My experience so far has been very negative, we've been using Bromcom for 1 and half years and support has been awful and the system itself has quite a few bugs/glitches...

[Bromcom_Darren]

My experience so far has been very negative, we've been using Bromcom for 1 and half years and support has been awful and the system itself has quite a few bugs/glitches...

 

As quoted on previous posts please email me on [email protected] and I am more than happy to discuss any cases you have outstanding or support you require.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

[supportman]

We are looking to potentially look more into moving to bromcom from sims

 

Would people be willing to provide their feelings and experience around this MIS and any pitfalls we should look out for

 

We are a secondary school with over 1400 pupils and over 200 staff

 

Also any costings would be great as well

 

Thank you

 

Similar size school to us, it was an easy process to move. Far less issues than I had been worried about as the person in charge of the move

 

Costs were pretty much the same if you included the 3rd party software we ditched.

 

Room bookings is an area that Bromcom lacks, but everything else such as cashless catering, integrated comms, parent portal etc are really good. Their apps are also awesome.

 

Overall I would say just go for it, you won't regret coming from Sims certainly. Need to obviously keep an open mind about new processes and such.

 

Timetabling can be fun and I think Bromcom are just about to release a new web app for that, but personally we kept with our 3rd party product there so it was an easy transition. Importing to Bromcom was a few clicks anyway.

[Dr_Zeux]

Similar size school to us, it was an easy process to move. Far less issues than I had been worried about as the person in charge of the move

 

Costs were pretty much the same if you included the 3rd party software we ditched.

 

Room bookings is an area that Bromcom lacks, but everything else such as cashless catering, integrated comms, parent portal etc are really good. Their apps are also awesome.

 

Overall I would say just go for it, you won't regret coming from Sims certainly. Need to obviously keep an open mind about new processes and such.

 

Timetabling can be fun and I think Bromcom are just about to release a new web app for that, but personally we kept with our 3rd party product there so it was an easy transition. Importing to Bromcom was a few clicks anyway.

 

You definitely have had a different experience to us, and I wonder if you're working with the every day issues in Bromcom?? The app was a nightmare up until recently, when the onboarding process changed... All parental invitations were so cumbersome and schools have had to support this process. Timetabling has not been fun at all. Are you supporting users and DMs, or acting as a DM through your LA?

[supportman]

You definitely have had a different experience to us, and I wonder if you're working with the every day issues in Bromcom?? The app was a nightmare up until recently, when the onboarding process changed... All parental invitations were so cumbersome and schools have had to support this process. Timetabling has not been fun at all. Are you supporting users and DMs, or acting as a DM through your LA?

 

Yes I hear you on the parent portal onboarding. The old process was painful. So glad they fixed that, but its seamless now

 

I think coming from Sims, we have far less daily issues than we used to. Our staff are pretty used to it and even now have some expertise in quick reports and PowerBi for the more advanced requests.

 

Having the Wonde integration has also been brilliant talking to other systems such as Sign in system, Biostore tills or parentseveningsystem.

 

We are an independent secondary academy so all support is done onsite. We have staff sign up to the regular webinars and coffee mornings so that useful.

 

When we moved, loads of people were worried because Sims was the way it "was always done" but people soon started to adapt. Attendance and the teacher app were particularly large improvements from the Sims days.

[gszech]

I think coming from Sims, we have far less daily issues than we used to. Our staff are pretty used to it and even now have some expertise in quick reports and PowerBi for the more advanced requests.

Sorry but this post would state otherwise: https://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/233791-bromcom-sso-issue-slowness-13.html

A lot of schools mentioned in the post they regretted migrating from SIMS to Bromcom.

 

For some reason you are constantly defending and glorifying Bromcom, where the reality is that the Bromcom is struggling with server performance and scaling in the UK.

As a result the MIS is not working, or it's super slow when the schools need it the most (taking register time, etc).

[Ditto]

In fairness, whilst there are lots of comments around Bromcom in the other thread that are critical, I don't think many (or any) expressed regret on the move away from SIMS. @supportman has called out Bromcom slowness before - see https://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/233791-bromcom-sso-issue-slowness-5.html#post2023456 so I think 'glorifying is over-stating it a little. Personally, I hope to be moving to a role where the first job is to lead a migration (or not perhaps!). All the opinions are experiences are great to hear and I'll take them onboard.

[supportman]

Sorry but this post would state otherwise: https://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/233791-bromcom-sso-issue-slowness-13.html

A lot of schools mentioned in the post they regretted migrating from SIMS to Bromcom.

 

For some reason you are constantly defending and glorifying Bromcom, where the reality is that the Bromcom is struggling with server performance and scaling in the UK.

As a result the MIS is not working, or it's super slow when the schools need it the most (taking register time, etc).

 

I think your confusing us being frustrated with a major recent 90min downtime at a peak registration time, with being super slow all the time:)

 

Its fine 99% of the time and our staff have no issues. Sure it could be quicker in some places, but that's me talking as a web developer and network manager myself.

 

If you check my posts, I'm also very complimentary about Arbor as well.

 

At the end of the day, all these issues are coming up because both Arbor and Bromcom have brought on loads of new customers. Its a sign of their success I guess.

[Dr_Zeux]

Sorry but this post would state otherwise: https://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/233791-bromcom-sso-issue-slowness-13.html

A lot of schools mentioned in the post they regretted migrating from SIMS to Bromcom.

 

For some reason you are constantly defending and glorifying Bromcom, where the reality is that the Bromcom is struggling with server performance and scaling in the UK.

As a result the MIS is not working, or it's super slow when the schools need it the most (taking register time, etc).

 

Totally agree!

[maxbradley]

We (A 6 school MAT) moved from SIMS to Bromcom last summer. Overall the move was pretty straightforward, make sure you've got the migration of any third party systems you use scheduled out. You'll need to create third party users in Bromcom system for any automated data transfers, which can only be done once you've received your live systems. Most apps connect via Wonde or Groupcall, and migrating those was very straightforward, they needed 3 days once we gave them the TP user and were fine. Catering providers can be a challenge, and may also charge a fee for the migration, so speak to them early. ParentPay was our biggest problem by far. 1 week after the migration all the schools came back and PP hadn't completed their work to use the new MIS, and started talking about how the migration takes 14 days, something that was never mentioned in previous discussions. The fact that PP is an ESS product is certainly just a coincidence.

 

Regarding the quality of Bromcom as opposed to SIMS; We're happy with it. I cannot imagine any heavy user of the MIS saying they miss SIMS and want to go back. It has areas of difficulty that are discussed in other threads so I won't go into here, but I've found the benefits to outweigh that, and am reasonably confident that the company is responsive to these issues.

[supportman]

We (A 6 school MAT) moved from SIMS to Bromcom last summer. Overall the move was pretty straightforward, make sure you've got the migration of any third party systems you use scheduled out. You'll need to create third party users in Bromcom system for any automated data transfers, which can only be done once you've received your live systems. Most apps connect via Wonde or Groupcall, and migrating those was very straightforward, they needed 3 days once we gave them the TP user and were fine. Catering providers can be a challenge, and may also charge a fee for the migration, so speak to them early. ParentPay was our biggest problem by far. 1 week after the migration all the schools came back and PP hadn't completed their work to use the new MIS, and started talking about how the migration takes 14 days, something that was never mentioned in previous discussions. The fact that PP is an ESS product is certainly just a coincidence.

 

Regarding the quality of Bromcom as opposed to SIMS; We're happy with it. I cannot imagine any heavy user of the MIS saying they miss SIMS and want to go back. It has areas of difficulty that are discussed in other threads so I won't go into here, but I've found the benefits to outweigh that, and am reasonably confident that the company is responsive to these issues.

 

Out of interest, why use Parent Pay at all? We changed to the bromcom payment feature in the parent portal and it works great! All integrated into the app as well. Saved us a lot of issues I think...

[maxbradley]

I had thought the same thing. However, the kitchens in the primaries are provided by the council and they use Cypad, which only integrates with ParentPay.

[misslincoln]

We are looking to potentially look more into moving to bromcom from sims

 

Would people be willing to provide their feelings and experience around this MIS and any pitfalls we should look out for

 

We are a secondary school with over 1400 pupils and over 200 staff

 

Also any costings would be great aswell

 

Thank you

 

How long have you had SIMs? Our biggest headache (although you'll have this with any swap) is we just had no concept of quite how much stuff our old system had, or who set it up and how in the first place. Starting from scratch felt kind of refreshing but SLT were quick to demand things be exactly how they were on Sims, quirks and all. I came in at the same time as the change so I was able to fob off a lot of changes to "oh I didn't know you still wanted forgot-my-slate as a sanction, sorry!"

 

Pros:

Bromcom is far more accessible for teaching and pastoral staff if they are willing to learn

Analysis is it's thing - so many tools and so much customisation

Way more friendly UI

Actually quite like the assessment

Loads of training available

 

Semi pro:

There are lots of ways to do the same thing and loads of customisation

 

Cons:

They seem to think they can distract us with shiny new stuff (Bromcom AI?!)when the basics go down frequently. Have also been told it's our fault when it was a nationwide issue.

REPORTS...

Far too many promises

System outages more than we would expect

 

Overall I think its better than SIMs now. I wasn't part of the consultation so I didn't see the other packages but realistically everything has it's flaws right? The only bugbear (which is very personal to my school) is I'm trying SO hard to sell Bromcom to my change-phobic staff and the frequent crashes and bugs recently make it almost impossible. But I'll get there eventually. They call me the Bromqueen, I'm not sure if it's a compliment anymore...

 

Good luck!

[Dr_Zeux]

How long have you had SIMs? Our biggest headache (although you'll have this with any swap) is we just had no concept of quite how much stuff our old system had, or who set it up and how in the first place. Starting from scratch felt kind of refreshing but SLT were quick to demand things be exactly how they were on Sims, quirks and all. I came in at the same time as the change so I was able to fob off a lot of changes to "oh I didn't know you still wanted forgot-my-slate as a sanction, sorry!"

 

Pros:

Bromcom is far more accessible for teaching and pastoral staff if they are willing to learn

Analysis is it's thing - so many tools and so much customisation

Way more friendly UI

Actually quite like the assessment

Loads of training available

 

Semi pro:

There are lots of ways to do the same thing and loads of customisation

 

Cons:

They seem to think they can distract us with shiny new stuff (Bromcom AI?!)when the basics go down frequently. Have also been told it's our fault when it was a nationwide issue.

REPORTS...

Far too many promises

System outages more than we would expect

 

Overall I think its better than SIMs now. I wasn't part of the consultation so I didn't see the other packages but realistically everything has it's flaws right? The only bugbear (which is very personal to my school) is I'm trying SO hard to sell Bromcom to my change-phobic staff and the frequent crashes and bugs recently make it almost impossible. But I'll get there eventually. They call me the Bromqueen, I'm not sure if it's a compliment anymore...

 

Good luck!

Yes, this is definitely one of the things that frustrates me - I try to be positive about the system, and time after time, the bugs/crashes and outages begin to drain you! Not only that, we don't even have a CSM anymore - he left 3 months ago, we weren't even informed he left (found out through a bounce back email), and still haven't been informed of their replacement!