[isams] 📢 Networking Opportunity for iSAMS Schools: Let's Connect!

[TomBusfield]

On 15/02/2025 at 18:14, carloslazaro said:

Hi Tom,

 

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. Your approach using a virtual machine, direct SQL connection, DataFlows, and scheduled refresh sounds very promising.

 

I'm particularly interested in learning more about the specifics of your setup. Would you be willing to share some more details?

 

Any insights you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks again for your willingness to help!

 

Best regards,

Carlos

[email protected]

Hi

 

Im very happy to help as much as I can, though I do want to immediately caveat that mileage may vary based on your set up, licensing and in house expertise (often set up relies on a willing and cooperative IT dept). 
 

Key points to look into is Virtual Machines and On-Prem Gateway. Both are now fairly well supported on the Microsoft help forums, but I can also answer any more specific questions you might have. 
 

From there, you then need to decide what your aim is, if simple data retrieval. If you hope to interact bi-directionally, looking into REST might be worth considering early too? 
 

Thanks,

Tom

[NewAgeCol]

I can attest to what Tom has outlined above - he pointed me into the right places re: gateway and virtual machines and it’s been running pretty seamlessly for a few months now.
 

I’m currently a team of one (and teach a full timetable and this is really building a business case for building out the data team more fully to work across the business). Our attendance dashboards have set us up well for ISI inspection and save staff a huge amount of time. Massive return on minimal investment when considered on those terms - that’s before we explore write back options with the API and dropping various platforms that we’re subscribed to.  

[TomBusfield]

On 15/04/2025 at 11:30, NewAgeCol said:

I can attest to what Tom has outlined above - he pointed me into the right places re: gateway and virtual machines and it’s been running pretty seamlessly for a few months now.
 

I’m currently a team of one (and teach a full timetable and this is really building a business case for building out the data team more fully to work across the business). Our attendance dashboards have set us up well for ISI inspection and save staff a huge amount of time. Massive return on minimal investment when considered on those terms - that’s before we explore write back options with the API and dropping various platforms that we’re subscribed to.  

 

Thanks! 

Glad all is working well for you! Happy to help. 

Tom

[rbjames]

Hi,

 

We use isams hosted and Salamander and they have done some great integrations for us. One area that will prove to be very helpful is staff cover. Isams appears to class periods in the same way as far as weighting goes so a 15 minute registration period has the same value as a 50 minute lesson. You could have two members of staff - one has covered 10 registrations, the other has covered 10 full lessons and yet they will appear to have covered the same. Salamander have set up a system which feeds the daily cover calendar to an outlook calendar. I've then set up a power automation to pull these periods to a sharepoint list which has a calculated column to give the number of minutes of cover teachers have been given. We will then be basing future cover decisions based on this data rather than what isams provided which is currently causing resentment among staff.

 

Another area I have found we can improve is setting for the rollover process. I have set up a power app which teachers use towards the end of the academic year which give them a list of students and radio buttons so they can choose which sets they will be in from September. This app then writes the set codes to a sharepoint list meaning that I don't have to manually populate it in the same way I have to populate all the other subjects. 

 

The third area we're going to be working on heavily is the calendar - currently Salamander feeds two outlook calendars. This will then in turn feed a sharepoint list where we'll add extra information such as a colour so our weekly information page can show the event with its relevant colour in an automatically generated html file. Currently everything is being done in Word and screenshots for signage which is time consuming.  

[jo_ha]

Hi,

We’ve recently migrated to the cloud-based iSAMS and are currently exploring our options for reporting and dashboards. We’ve adopted the Central platform, which is user-friendly and straightforward, but we’ve noticed that not all iSAMS data is available there. Since it uses the embedded version of Power BI, we’re also limited in terms of creating custom fields or calculated measures.

Additionally, we have access to the Snowflake data warehouse via Central Connect, which gives us the ability to create custom views and import data into Power BI Desktop. However, we’re finding that only certain views created by IRIS are visible to us, meaning we don’t have access to the full dataset from iSAMS.

I’d love to hear from others about how you’re approaching reporting in Power BI with iSAMS data. What processes have you set up, and what has your experience been so far?

Thanks,
Joseph