OPEN COMPETITION - Reward £1,000 by Bromcom

[Damon]

Thanks everyone, the competition has now closed. I'll have a chat with my co-moderator Nick and let you know the result (aiming for tomorrow).

[vikpaw]

Thanks for this Vik!

 

It made me question my own searching abilities for a moment and then I saw that it had only just been published by ESS. Funny that eh! This is genuinely super helpful for a lot of reasons, so thanks for posting it.

 

The power of Google! Now if only they could fix Chrome's dislike of hardware acceleration on a Mac; and WebGL2 issues; and Google Meet failing. Then again Teams is also now called Screams in my book, but i digress, so i'll retire back to my CLI corner and shut up.

 

Full transparency: https://www.sims-partners.com/Product/SIMS7/March24/CodeSamples

and, https://www.sims-partners.com/SIMS7/CodeSamples/July24/

[Damon]

Hi Everyone,

 

Firstly I’d like to say thanks to everyone who got involved in the discussions both on here and LinkedIn. There’s been lots of good debate about the problem at hand and indeed this was one of the objectives, having collective effort and discussion about the SIMS migration challenges created by ESS.

 

It’s clear that pulling school data out of SIMS is highly problematic. Whilst we did have potential solutions for some of the lookups, there are still a lot of gaps, particularly for the legacy modules which hold essential information for Secondary schools. This is the school’s own data and should be made available to them as part of offboarding.

 

Bromcom hold firm in their belief that it’s unacceptable for schools to not have full access to their data when offboarding and are offering legal indemnity to any schools that wish to migrate using a SIMS backup file. This is essential data owned by the schools and creates a significant barrier and risk for them to migrate in a way that complies with ESS’ rules.

 

Conclusion of this competition:

 

The competition results confirmed to Bromcom that migrating data in line with ESS’ terms and conditions mean it is not possible to migrate the entirety of a school’s MIS dataset. Furthermore, even more concerning for ESS Hosted schools is that they are not even permitted to hold a backup of their own data.

 

Competition results:

 

When it comes to the competition, both Bromcom and the moderators were happy to see some great ideas put forward and we had a lot of discussion about who should receive the reward for their nominated charity. As no-one was able to complete the scope, we scored based on the following criteria:

 

• How much of the scope is it covering?
  
• It is original work or referenced?
  
• How innovative is it?
  
• Is this information helpful to the migration project?
  

 

The moderators (myself and Nick Finnemore) evaluated the participants and after some discussion with Ali Guryel (MD/Founder of Bromcom), the decision was made to expand the prize pot to £5,000 and split between four winners. The highest scorer will receive £2,000 for their charity of choice, with the other 3 receiving £1,000 each for their nominated charity.

 

The 4 prize winners are as follows:

 

Special mention with £2,000 donation:

• Marci - Automated processing of PDF exports using Power automate
  

 

Winners of £1,000 donation (in alphabetical order)

• dhicks - Parsed PDF file concept
  
• Steve21 - Coded behaviour outputs with report generator
  
• Vikpaw - Lookup queries through SIMS API
  

 

I will be contacting each of these users individually to obtain their nominated charity or school if they wish to use the money within their establishment.

 

Bromcom thanks all the participants to this competition and hopes this demonstrates how they stand for open and fair competition within the Edtech market.

Edited July 15, 2024 by Damon

[Marci]

Cor... ummmz... ta! Bear with whilst I have words about how here wants to handle.

[Damon]

No probs Marci, take some time to think about it and let me know when you're ready.

 

Bromcom have set a deadline of 26th July to get all the charities agreed and payments made so a shout out to all winners - please make your decision by then otherwise myself and Nick will have to nominate a charity in your absence. Once all payments have been made, we'll do a wrap up post to announce who the money went to.

[PotNoodleTech]

Hang on guys and gals don't nominate yet, I am just registering my charity - PotNoodleTech Edu hobnob and possibly beer hardship fund Ltd.

[Damon]

Hang on guys and gals don't nominate yet, I am just registering my charity - PotNoodleTech Edu hobnob and possibly beer hardship fund Ltd.

Quick! You've got less than two weeks before the deadline!

[Bromcom-PR]

 

Conclusion of this competition:

 

The competition results confirmed to Bromcom that migrating data in line with ESS’ terms and conditions mean it is not possible to migrate the entirety of a school’s MIS dataset. Furthermore, even more concerning for ESS Hosted schools is that they are not even permitted to hold a backup of their own data.

 

 

Thank you all for assisting in concluding a very important outcome as above. This yet again justifies the use of SQL database backup files as an inevitable process for schools to migrate from SIMS to a new MIS

Edited July 16, 2024 by Bromcom-PR

[dhicks]

Bear with whilst I have words about how here wants to handle.

 

Same here - I think probably our bursary charity, but let me check with SLT first.

[Damon]

No problem David, drop me the details when you're ready and we can get it wrapped up before the summer break.

[ryan_lake]

Interesting thread. Altough I am late to this I am keen to know how eveyone tested their outputs? Schools generally dont grant access to their live SIMS schools data as it could breach GDPR guidlines. Is their a SIMS test sandbox enviroment that eveyone uses? As a parent I would not be over the moon if my childs and my personal data was being used for competitive purpose and gain.

[Marci]

Lookup code lists / infrastructural tables of which this exercise was mainly the target tend not to include any personal details…

 

SIMS developer account holders have a sandbox for API development, and things like this tend to be done against the “GreenAbbey” training dataset that you can have dropped in to your SIMS install.

 

I tested PDF scraping with outputs from BCs training dataset, and also still have our old greenabbey report outputs from when I was working with SIMS which confirmed their PDF generation was done semantically (plus I use the whole technique in production anyway so know it works).

[ryan_lake]

How do I become a SIMS Developer account holder and access this API sandbox? is there a cost or addtional license?

[Marci]

No idea nowadays - last I had one was 2017. (Been BC since 2018). There was a fee, and was requested via support back then. Prior to that I had one with Serco for Facility, no fee but had to attend a training course before they’d give access, but wasn’t really needed as everything you did in Facility was raw SQL anyways.

 

SIMS Training dataset was usually free and just needed asking for / installing.

 

BC training instance is available on request from BC if you’re a customer - just throw support a ticket.

[Marci]

On the Wonde comments elsewhere in thread… you don’t (or didn’t used to) get lookup table endpoints from what I recall (haven’t touched our in-house integration in years) - live data records only. Duplicate table, extract column of codes for all rows, remove duplicates to make lookups from the event records (same as we’d do in PowerBI etc)… but stops meaningful historic analysis on data migrated this way, as you won’t get categories that had no records, which then skews percentages etc. A live-data migration lets you maintain your edu-records history, but to be able to do 5-year historical analysis you really need a “full” migration.

[Marci]

(Aside: the sum total of info provided to BC by me for my “entry” was my first post in this thread and the words it contained. There was no submission to them. Vik looks to have decoded structures from publicly available docs he referenced - no testing or generation of outputs required / necessary for his entry)

[Damon]

Interesting thread. Altough I am late to this I am keen to know how eveyone tested their outputs? Schools generally dont grant access to their live SIMS schools data as it could breach GDPR guidlines. Is their a SIMS test sandbox enviroment that eveyone uses? As a parent I would not be over the moon if my childs and my personal data was being used for competitive purpose and gain.

 

No one was submitting any data here and all responses were simply descriptions of a concept or method as to how it could be done. Folks on this forum are professionals that are generally the ones explaining to the rest of the school how to keep data secure and compliant. 👍

Edited July 16, 2024 by Damon

[Steve101]

No one was submitting any data here and all responses were simply descriptions of a concept or method as to how it could be done. Folks on this forum are professionals that are generally the ones explaining to the rest of the school how to keep data secure and compliant. 👍

 

I think his point was that if you were testing this to win £1000 on a live instance of SIMS. That is not an appropriate reason to access anyones data and would therefore be a data breach.

[FN-GM]

I think his point was that if you were testing this to win £1000 on a live instance of SIMS. That is not an appropriate reason to access anyones data and would therefore be a data breach.

 

Testing is always done in a test environment…. [emoji846]

[Damon]

Ones that like should just be the case of building the report the "right" way around. For example, doing it via student roles rather than via behaviour gives more access to info including Type and TypeCode:

 

Steve

Hi Steve, would you mind checking your PMs

[Damon]

Hi All, we have all the details for the nominated charities and educational establishments and the Bromcom accounts team will get these all processed. I'll let you know when the payments have been made.