Arbor - my first thoughts as a System Admin

[JamesWeatherill]

4 hours ago, dmj said:

Quick Question about both platforms: Do either offer a hosted MCP server?

 

MCP has been the hottest thing in AI for the last six months and I've found them invaluable.

MCP is essentially an interface between the platforms API and your hosted AI agent. The way this works for me is that I authenticate (with my personal creds) to a remote MCP server and then I can use my local AI to ask questions of the API. e.g: "get me a list of the top 100 users with the following attributes, x,y,z. write the output to a google doc". 

This is a huge thing in (non-edu) tech right now and wondered if Arbor/BromCom are doing this or just reselling their own AI platforms with a large markup?

Alternatively, how open is the spec for the API's - writing MCP servers isn't difficult.

 

We have built a v1 of this for our own internal use - it's how Ask Arbor works and orchestrates our cover agent, data analysis agent, room booking agent when you ask a question. You will also start to see more of this for external consumption as we integrate Habitude (our new workflow automation tool) into Arbor. MCPs can expose data privacy and permissioning issues, so worth doing carefully and not jumping in all guns blazing!

[dmj]

5 minutes ago, JamesWeatherill said:

 

MCPs can expose data privacy and permissioning issues, so worth doing carefully and not jumping in all guns blazing!

Something I'm grappling with right now as it happens!

Really glad to see this coming to fruition in the edu sector. kudos.

[MrEprise]

On 06/06/2025 at 06:36, timbo343 said:

1. Whilst testing our dummy site, setting user permissions is clunky. I thought Bromcom was clunky but in my opinion Arbor isn't any better. Not being able to export user permissions and import them into a live system is a bit.. ah really!?

 

2. Still on the user permissions, trying to create an Arbor Sys Admin role for those with full admin access is very slow and clunky having to click on every individual permission to turn it to "allow". There's over 250 of these permissions! I would have thought it would have thought that the role permissions would have been set out in at least modules / groups.

 

3. We have to use and edit one of the pre-defined permission roles to turn it into our own user permission role and unable to add to this list.

 

Feel like mentioning this - when we migrated to Arbor in February/March, we ran into the same user permissions issue, or at least I did.

 

In SIMS I had the sysadmin role as well as a bunch of others. Three other people, 2 within SLT and 1 in Admin also had the same role. When we migrated over to the dummy site, I had lost the sysadmin role and ended up with the most basic permissions you can possibly get in Arbor yet the other aforementioned members of staff all retained their relevant roles. I had to request the relevant access from one of those members of Staff in order to be able to do anything.

 

Even though I was known to Arbor to be the "IT Manager" involved with the migration, they were not prepared to give me the required access at the other end for "security reasons", bar API access. I did flag this up as I thought this is likely to happen again when we do the final migration and someone was going to look into it. Obviously, when we did the final migration, the same thing happened again and I had to get the correct permissions from a member of staff here.

 

In my opinion, I think Arbor's migration process favours staff in a non-IT role i.e. in Primary schools where you might not have a specific IT person on site and then when it gets to staff in an IT role, it then doesn't know what permissions to apply to them.

 

Then of course when you come to assigning the relevant permissions, you're walking through a minefield of permissions that either don't make sense or don't seem to let you do what's required, despite what each permission description says. I still have issues now where hovering over items in Arbor will produce a pop-up saying that I don't have permissions for that.

 

Yes SIMS was terrible for a lot of things but setting permissions seemed to be easier there than in Arbor.