Sending SIMS Assessment Reports via email in PDF format

[Huxy]

Been reading a lot of different ways on how to send school report as a pdf via email to parents and/or pupils. Does anyone know of an easy / cheap / free way of doing this?

 

We currently use SchoolComms just for this in order to send school reports to an email address from the SIMS document server. We are trying to find an alternative way of doing this as the cost of using SchoolComms is becoming very expensive. It is a shame that SchoolComms's licensing doesn't allow for this functionality only as I am sure that other schools would want this.

 

We have looked at several alternative systems such as Edulink and Insight by TASC software. Is anyone aware of an alternative system / method that would achieve this?

 

We have thought about using some sort of third-party emailing client but this would reply on a certain naming convention of each report against an email address and we would have to compile the reports twice. Once as an individual PDF to email out and then again in order to send them to the document server so that they can be viewed by teachers.

 

Any ideas or support would be appreciated.

[coolhands]

Sims intouch is only £1100. Doubt any other 3rd party would be much cheaper?

[Huxy]

What is £1100 based on? is it pupil numbers?

[coolhands]

I’m not sure, our pupil number on roll is 2000 so for most schools they would have less, so I guess might be cheaper if anything.

[Jamman960]

SchoolPost works well for this but not sure on pricing now, just need to upload indovidual pdfs or a zip file containing them all, so long as they have the pupils code and/or name in the file name it’ll generate the mails. It’s a great system for day to day comms as parents can sign into a portal and see them all as well as getting notifications to say they’re there.

[dhicks]

Does anyone know of an easy / cheap / free way of doing this?

 

In theory, it sounds like you need a relatively simple script that steps through each pupil in your database by pupil ID number, gets their parent(s) email address(es), matches them up with a report PDF, then sends an email with that PDF attached. You could use your standard email service (maybe GMail / Office 365?) for sending, or an email delivery service like Mailchimp or SendGrid (deliverability is likely to be better for bulk emails). Assuming you either have some sort of API access to your MIS or you can produce a report listing pupil ID and parent contact emails that should pretty much be a Python script with a couple of for-each loops. However, you would then be left dealing with un-received emails / lost emails / etc yourself, at which point £1,000 or so per year sounds quite reasonable for a system to deal with that for you.

[mavhc]

I doubt the company you pay £1000 to will bother finding out why the emails bounced, what are they going to do, phone and ask you why the email you put in for that parent is wrong?

[dhicks]

I doubt the company you pay £1000 to will bother finding out why the emails bounced, what are they going to do, phone and ask you why the email you put in for that parent is wrong?

 

Ah - just realised for some reason I'd thought SchoolPost was £1,000-ish a year, but I can't actually find any pricing for it. It sounds like a sensible approach, a "file store" per user (parent) that they can access, probably via login-code-sent-via-email (with them, you'd hope, at least providing a report of any invalid emails / bounces / etc), but not sure what sort of price they're charging.

 

The other place to check might be the Wonde marketplace, there's apps listed in there that handle this kind of thing with the data synced to Wonde from your MIS.

[SamyW]

If anyone stumbles across this thread like I did, I've made a tool that does this.

https://github.com/nuckypuck/SIMS-Academic-Progress-Report-Sender

There may be other solutions already, but it's free and I need projects for my placement so if it helps then feel free to use it.