[sims] Tidying and cleaning SIMS in preparation for Bromcom

[JoeS]

Hello,

 

I am in the process of attempting to get rid of decades of old data in our SIMS database in preparation for a move to Bromcom.

 

We have not done any housekeeping within the last few years I don't think.

I have already managed to delete a load of old student data for student over 25 (over 30 if SEN). Plus deleted almost all the previous years admission records and admission groups. And then deleted the resulting unlinked contacts.

 

A few questions I have is:

 

1. We still have 9.5K contacts. Running a report, there appear to be a number of contacts with no student relationships and no applicant relationships. But they are not appearing in the unlinked contacts screen? Does this mean they have relationships with perhaps staff or agents? Designing a report with Contacts as the focus, I see no subreports allowing me to list staff or agent relationships? Why else might they not be appearing in unlinked contacts?

 

2. Should I try and run the address tidy and/or merge routine? I don't think this has been done for years. I ran the reports from the wizard without actually running the routine and it came up with 19K rows for the tidy report and 2.8K rows for the merge report. A lot of the rows in the tidy report just said <> which I assume will be helpful to clean old data. But I don't understand where this address is being stored if the "Residents" columns says ? How long might this take to run?

 

3. Is there any tidying I can do on the document side of things? Apart from individual reports, we have a lot of documents relating to SEN for SEN students and equally lots of medial issues documents for those with medical issues. Is it right that these will need to be downloaded from SIMS, and then uploaded to Bromcom? Will the SEN documents and Medical documents need to be uploaded to specific SEN and Medical document storage areas in Bromcom? Or flagged somehow that they are to do with SEN or Medical?

 

And if anyone has any "must do" SIMS tidying when preparing for a Bromcom migration, please let me know!

 

Many thanks

[mikes]

We are doing similar for a move to arbor. For me I did a delete student data for all those over 31 years old (which had never been done) and my boss has been deleting associated (now) null contacts.

Not sure how she is doing it sorry if she has ran a report or not.

We've been given a document from our LEA showing what to do for our data cleanse, will try and find it, but tbh I don't think it's that in depth - pretty sure it doesn't even cover sims docstorage - but Arbor may have a different migration method

[Linfit]

I went through this process exactly two years ago.

Its time consuming - I spent a lot of time between Sept and Jan cleaning and tidying SIMS in between doing the Bromcom training. Its going to be difficult it you are trying to fit it into other jobs. I had been put in charge of the migration so it was essentially my full time role at the time, so do-able.

 

I used to purge the over 25's regularly so we did not have too many old records to start with.

Main issue with contacts is duplicates - same person but recorded twice in the system as they have been re-entered rather than an existing contact attached. Various ways of dealing with this, including producing a list of all contacts and tracking down the ones with the same names and details and confirming they are the same - one can then be detached from a child and the remaining one attached instead, they can then be deleted using unlinked contacts. This is a very slow process.

 

Address tidy and merge is worth doing - I recall it took some time but not hours - best done out of hours though. Like all these routines, its worth doing multiple times.

 

The other big issue for us was data stored in the wrong fields in the contact info or not flagged correctly. For example, many instances of Grandma's phone number being entered as a note on the phone number for a parent. Bromcom doesn't like this, they need to be either removed it not relevant or put in as a separate contact. The other issue we had which caused us grief was telephone numbers of contacts not being flagged as mobiles. Unless they are flagged correctly, when they go through to Bromcom they will not be flagged as a mobile number and the Bromcom comms system, which is very good, will not work properly. We were using Edulink for comms previously and this was more forgiving in this respect.

 

As to documents, have a long think about what actually needs migrating. Nothing comes through automatically and although there are tools which will pull all attached documents from the document server we decided to go for the nuclear option and took nothing out of the doc server. We then uploaded clean new versions of things like medical records and SEN info - which had the added advantage of ensuring that anything that was uploaded was the latest version of everything. And yes, Bromcom allows you to flag SEN Medical and other docs in specific categories in the pupil profile. We had access to the SIMS server and could have pulled assessment reports if required, but in the two years since we have never had a need to do so.

Edited January 29, 2025 by Linfit