SIMS --> Arbor (How was it?)

[MooreJay95]

Afternoon all,

 

We are migrating our MIS from SIMS to Arbor over the next few months.

 

I was wondering how everyone found the migration if they have done the same. Is there anything that was particularly troublesome? or anything that you would recommend if you could migrate again?

 

We are a secondary school with around 1000 users (staff and students) currently on role

 

Thanks in advance

[Disease]

As long as you work through all the training and data checks it's easy.

[LeMarchand]

3x KS1/2 sites. One very early adopter, the others fairly early. The only problem I had with the migration was that some of the documentation could have been clearer. I'm sure that's been tightened up since, though.

 

Since then, the only problem I have is that my permissions seem to vary from site to site and I sometimes have to get access to someone else's console to run/design a report. Not heavy users of advanced functions, though.

[gbtb]

We moved to Arbor last Summer along with all other schools within the trust. Migration went smoothly with a few hiccups regarding linked documents. My advice would be to check these carefully, they seemed to have issues with custom document types (we had one in SIMS called Medical Evidence as the type) and these would not migrate over.

 

Make sure all staff have completed the most basic of training so are able to use the system for basic functions and then build from there.

 

Finally, make sure you check everyone's business roles and permissions, we had issues with people having more access than we would have liked (for example an Admin assistant by default had permission to view all staff HR data).

[Oaktech]

My son's school has just done it and it seemed to go fairly smoothly.

 

I talk to their IT on the regular because my 9yo Son likes to, err, push boundaries.

 

They've reported that the biggest issue they had was bulk exporting/importing things like attendance comments.

 

From a parent point of view they are a 4 school primary MAT where all 4 schools are geographically quite close and it required special configuration from Arbor to allow for the possibility to have a single point of contact to have one or more children in each school in the MAT.

[sefton]

I've done 9 migrations now, secondary and primary, and have found them quite straightforward if you do your data checking and clean up thoroughly, although some things are best left until the data is in Arbor as it is far easier to correct. Ensuring staff have the correct raining would be my other take away, not teachers as it straight forward for them but back office staff and attendance officers.