Problems this morning with Bromcom?

[Dr_Zeux]

2 hours ago, machy said:

Got staff here complaining its still dog slow... 

 

Anyone else? 

Same here!  And all over the weekend as well...

[Olliedawg]

Latest update

 

[TheRobins]

Comments section worth a read with a custard cream or two

 

https://community.bromcomcloud.com/announcements/post/performance-issues-in-progress-Ah7hUHmlIQPCgo1

[psynegy]

Did anyone find out about the SLA?

  

On 05/09/2025 at 19:11, falko1 said:

We are new, on-boarded this summer. Trying to get our heads around it all and the last two days has been painful with the disruption. Safe to say I could do with setting something like this up. Can you help point me in the right direction

 

I will do a little write up on this once I've got it figured out! I think the best way to do this I've found so far is to set up a scheduled "Blank Register" report for each period separately (so you have a separate file per period). You will note that the blank registers don't have the room on them, so I'm just trying to find a report that maps classes to rooms. Might end up being easier to do a custom report for the whole thing... We'll see!

Edited September 8, 2025 by psynegy

[Rob_D]

6 minutes ago, psynegy said:

Did anyone find out about the SLA?

 

The SLA response times can be found here https://docs.bromcom.com/knowledge-base/bromcom-support-desk-guide/ (about 3/4 of the way down the page).

[Synkrox]

According to their own docs - Only one instance of the application..... but no single point of failure... 🤔

 

Struggle to believe such a massive platform could be kneecapped for all users so absolutely unless it has an inherent design flaw.

 

I wonder if there's some technical debt from years back that means Bromcom sits on one big fat server or Azure application and hasn't been built for resilience and scale.
 

 

Bromcom Cloud FAQs – Bromcom – Documentation Centre

 

[NaimM]

We have been having this issue too since Friday, and it is ongoing.😡

[Synkrox]

On 05/09/2025 at 12:36, Wizard101 said:

Migrated to Bromcom from SIMS. First 2 days school starts systems down.... what a start. Already had a phone call saying maybe SIMS was better 😅.  All we are getting are updates saying its fixed after they've only restarted the server.

From what I've been able to see and use in Bromcom which isn't much because its been down I think Bromcom has potential to be an amazing MIS, hopefully it will be better once this issue is resolved

Even though it was 3 years ago I chose Bromcom, the fact that for the past 3 years every September has been problematic still gives me embarrassment.

[Tech1]

I've raised a formal complaint with Bromcom on behalf of my schools. This level of outage with no apparent fail safes in place is completely unacceptable. 

 

Information on how to raise a complaint can be found here - https://docs.bromcom.com/knowledge-base/how-to-raise-a-complaint-about-bromcoms-products-or-services/

[machy]

do they have cats running around the server room?

[simpsonj]

 12:43 The system has restarted. This was not a planned restart and we are monitoring as the system comes back online.

 

Sympathy for the Bromcom Techs, but that statement does not inspire confidence...

[simpsonj]

Slightly off topic, though very much related, has anyone else experienced issues with their syncs from Bromcom to either Google or M365?

 

Whilst not a new phenomenon, I've had so many issues with Class Notebook this year, I wondered if it was linked, perhaps Bromcom went down as it was trying to sync with M365? For example, it created all the classes as Groups, but didn't make them into Teams. A manual resync of all classes when Bromcom was working then created the Teams as expected, but I wonder if that pause has caused some of the sync and distribution issues we've been having since. Just wondered if anyone else had the same.

[Synkrox]

29 minutes ago, simpsonj said:

 12:43 The system has restarted. This was not a planned restart and we are monitoring as the system comes back online.

 

Sympathy for the Bromcom Techs, but that statement does not inspire confidence...

 

At least PRETEND you did it on purpose 😂

Or style this whole thing out as a "Cyber incident" 

 

[taz]

41 minutes ago, simpsonj said:

Slightly off topic, though very much related, has anyone else experienced issues with their syncs from Bromcom to either Google or M365?

 

Whilst not a new phenomenon, I've had so many issues with Class Notebook this year, I wondered if it was linked, perhaps Bromcom went down as it was trying to sync with M365? For example, it created all the classes as Groups, but didn't make them into Teams. A manual resync of all classes when Bromcom was working then created the Teams as expected, but I wonder if that pause has caused some of the sync and distribution issues we've been having since. Just wondered if anyone else had the same.

There was a known issue with Microsoft graph corrupting permissions with SDS created Teams this year. It's affected things like Class Notebook for example - you just get "something happened..please retry" error when trying to create them.   Microsoft say they deployed a fix last week for future SDS-created Teams but we have to manually fix the existing ones.  

 

This is the script we used - I took the one from the KB article to fix a list of IDs at a time, but the engineer gave me a second option below for csv imports. 

 

Provisioning classes at scale using PowerShell and Microsoft Graph - Microsoft Support

 

 

#You will need to connect to Graph with the following -Scopes Sites.FullControl.All

 

#Chose which type of import, either search all Teams HiddenMembership Teams (all class Teams are Hiddenmembership by default) that are not archived, or comment out the first line with # and remove the comment from the second and define the path with the CSV. Please make sure the column with the groupIDs has the header names GroupIDs or you will need to change the property in the foreach loop

 

$Groups = Get-Team -Archived:$false -Visibility HiddenMembership -ErrorAction stop

#$Groups = Import-Csv -Path "C:\users\"

$step = 0

 

 

Write-Host "Working on $($Groups.Count) Classes"

 

foreach ($group in $groups) {

 $step = $step + 1

 $Site = Get-MgGroupSite -GroupId $group.GroupId -SiteId "root"

 $SiteId = $Site.Id

 Write-Host "Processing permissions on $step of $($Groups.Count) Classes"

 # These are the AppIds for common Microsoft EDU Apps

 $AppIds = @{

 "8f348934-64be-4bb2-bc16-c54c96789f43"="EDU Assignments";

 "22d27567-b3f0-4dc2-9ec2-46ed368ba538"="Reading Assignments";

 "2d4d3d8e-2be3-4bef-9f87-7875a61c29de"="OneNote";

 "c9a559d2-7aab-4f13-a6ed-e7e9c52aec87"="Microsoft Forms";

 "13291f5a-59ac-4c59-b0fa-d1632e8f3292"="EDU OneNote";

 }

 

# Apply the permissions to the group site

$AppIds.Keys | %{

  $AppId = $_

  $Name = $AppIds[$_]

 

  $Body = @"

  { 

     "roles": ["fullcontrol"], 

     "grantedToIdentities": [{ 

       "application": { 

         "id": "$AppId",

         "displayName": "$Name"

        }

      }] 

  }

"@

 

 Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method POST -Uri "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/$SiteId/permissions" -Body $Body -ContentType "application/json"

}

}

Write-Host "Processed $($Groups.Count) Classes"

[machy]

[DrBeaker]

On 04/09/2025 at 13:05, psydii said:

I'm not saying they are losing hearts and minds, but out classcharts "champion" has taken a look at sims next gen, and openly speculated that it might be better value.

 

Classcharts had it's own problems last academic year thought too. With days of outages and only a wall of silence from their "support" pages 

 

Yet let's 'cloud all the things'...

 

 

8 hours ago, kennysarmy said:

Slow here... but then it's Monday - surely we can't expect BROMCOM to run fine every school day 😕

 

SIMS was not perfect by any means. Sometimes I absolutely hated it and it's support partners, BUT... 

 

SIMS worked fine for me for the most part in all the years we had it, managed it and looked after the ONSITE server.

 

I could remote to it, any problems I could walk across site to the server room and physically look at the server and deal with issues.

 

Staff had onsite and remote access with few issues.

 

 

 

7 hours ago, TheRobins said:

Feel your pain, its going to leave a bad impression for the users.

 

Other MIS providers will be rubbing their hands with this one. 

 

Arbor from what I hear colleagues say not perfect by any means either and has it's own set of quirks etc. I bet ESS etc are loving this though.

 

 

7 hours ago, mthomas08 said:

 

I can't speak for others like Arbor, but SIMs wasn't exactly any better...   and one main reason it had any kind of reliability is because of the work I put in and how I planned updates.

 

Updated during around holiday periods -  to make sure all equipment updated fine. Plus we would test key areas.

 

Avoid deploying when released due to patches to fix the updates. I won't discuss the times when an updated patch.. to fix an updated patch.. to fix another updated patch.. to fix the updated release.

 

All that before I get calls from Data Manager/Attendance/Exams about a glitch they have needs an URGENT patch and here it is. Which reboots SIMs and kicks users out.... The non urgent ones would be done remotely at home..

 

Even worse when the patches didn't even fix their problems......

 

UGH!!  As much as Bromcom having the performances issues are a headache... I do not miss SIMs at all...

 

 

Pretty much how we approached it as well. Maybe this incident with Bromcom will make people realise it takes a LOT of work behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly and properly. 

 

Liased with the right people, our support company who were brilliant and highly knowledgeable in MIS matters. 

 

Only issues we had were to do with SIMS itself, the few dodgy patches etc, hardly any with the server.

 

Despite this, I do not miss SIMS and all that headache. SIMS had it's time in the sun.

 

6 hours ago, synaesthesia said:

And my "offline cache" suggestion seems more and more pertinent. The emergency services have offline caches for all their vital systems, it seems daft that too many people in Education are blinded by "but we should be cloud" "we mustn't have anything local" etc. 

 

Does that include IT folks who think anything local is "bad". Funny how my local systems have worked without issues any times we've had internet, network issues etc.

 

 

 

Generally this is the issue with people relying far far too much on 'the cloud' to be the magic bullet to all business/IT/school problems.

 

It has it's own system of dependencies etc e.g. Brome relying on Azure hosting services. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DrCheese]

I do think the DFE is going to either come down hard on MIS vendors to insist on a certain amount of uptime, or start forcing schools to have backup methods of accessing basic student information digitality/emailing parents

 

Right now we'd have access to classcharts to pull this if needed but I know others don't have this/any other system (& we plan to remove CC currently)

[dmj]

14 hours ago, DrBeaker said:

 

Pretty much how we approached it as well. Maybe this incident with Bromcom will make people realise it takes a LOT of work behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly and properly. 

 

True enough, but it is clear that there is a very serious design flaw in this this system - they've done something really bad like put all customers onto the same database instance or something similar. The entire point of the cloud (azure,gcp,aws) is that you can very simply spin up different instances, load balancers, pubsub,  kubernetes clusters etc to isolate, and that you can scale immediately and in response to load. None of that is happening at Bromcom, it's like they've just done a lift and shift on a hosted install and expect it to cater for tens of thousands of users. It's not a problem with cloud services per se, it's a problem with Bromcoms approach to it. 

[TheCookieMonster]

14 hours ago, DrCheese said:

I do think the DFE is going to either come down hard on MIS vendors to insist on a certain amount of uptime, or start forcing schools to have backup methods of accessing basic student information digitality/emailing parents

Moving schools to act like businesses with academisation has pushed the responsibility of good procurement (including vetting and supplier management) over to them from a local authority. An academy gets more money, but you get more responsibility for making good choices and holding vendors to account with it. We can't have it both ways. Same goes for paper backup methods - that's up to the schools to have. Same if you have a power cut or lose internet for the day.

[machy]

I'm getting reports of it being dog slow again here 

[Synkrox]

Sigh. Another day of this. Whatever they are doing, simply isn't enough.

[psynegy]

We too are struggling here with it intermittently throwing errors or not loading.

[3s-gtech]

I'd like to thank so many of you for leaving SIMS - Connected has been much better this September as a result. That won't be because they've improved it.

 

I think we all need to bookmark this thread and post a link to it the next time Bromcom sue someone for not choosing their bid.

[DrCheese]

39 minutes ago, TheCookieMonster said:

Moving schools to act like businesses with academisation has pushed the responsibility of good procurement (including vetting and supplier management) over to them from a local authority. An academy gets more money, but you get more responsibility for making good choices and holding vendors to account with it. We can't have it both ways. Same goes for paper backup methods - that's up to the schools to have. Same if you have a power cut or lose internet for the day.

 

Aye I agree it's on us to sort & have. I can just see schools not wanting to spend the cash & then the DFE dealing with the fallout by mandating it.

[pete]

1 hour ago, TheCookieMonster said:

Moving schools to act like businesses with academisation has pushed the responsibility of good procurement (including vetting and supplier management) over to them from a local authority. An academy gets more money, but you get more responsibility for making good choices and holding vendors to account with it. We can't have it both ways. Same goes for paper backup methods - that's up to the schools to have. Same if you have a power cut or lose internet for the day.

 

True, but many schools (and trusts and LAs) procure goods and services via government frameworks because said frameworks implied the government had already done a certain amount of due diligence around supplier competence, ability to deliver the promised service and value for money, offering a list of "pre-evaluated suppliers".

 

But as is frequently demonstrated that "pre-evaluation" is at best a snapshot in time.  Great if you're familiar with the product(s) on offer and know what you want - it saves having to do the "three quotes" farce when the margins are razor-thin already.  Absolutely useless if you're buying a widget for a thingy and have no experience of either.