SIMS Connected, Change Password

[Jobos]

I was asked yesterday how a user could change their SIMS Connected password and this should be a simple thing to do but I'm unable to find anything about changing password. Yes I could use the 'manage your users' section in the launcher and change it for them but staff need to do this for themselves.

 

Am I looking in the wrong place?

 

 

[psydii]

We don't use it, but maybe the user can access id.sims.co.uk themselves and do it there?  We're onboarding people straight into NG with  365 integrated auth with the hope of avoiding this nonsense.

[Jobos]

2 hours ago, psydii said:

We don't use it, but maybe the user can access id.sims.co.uk themselves and do it there?  We're onboarding people straight into NG with  365 integrated auth with the hope of avoiding this nonsense.

Yes you are correct. The address needed to change passwords is id.sims.co.uk which is nowhere near the address used for registers home.sims.co.uk/registers

I’ve added the register address to the teacher start menu but looks like I’m going to need the change password address too. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was I link from the register page but there isn’t. 

Interesting to hear you can use 365 integrated auth with NG as wasn’t aware of that and a good call. It would have saved a lot of headaches if I had known. 
 

[Mr.Ben]

AFAIK it's still not a really useful SSO solution - users have to configure it for themselves, which removes the 'making it easy' benefit.

[psydii]

Have you seen the new login screen? It appears to default to two options only, 365 or Google. This bodes well, can only assume the new onboarding flow is streamlined to 3rd party SSO.

 

The current flow is certainly not intuitive, though I did have someone complete it correctly without supervision the other day. There’s a first time for everything, I guess.

[psydii]

(BTW SSO is great, and works well, it’s just you’ve got to get onboarding that first time just right for it to work)

[psydii]

Looks like its 'all change'. There are new KB articles up, and a new enterprise app to approve. 

KB0016094 Overview of the new DfE aligned SSO strategy.

KB0016096 (How to set it up)

KB0016093 (FAQs)

 

Get them via SIMS -> "Product Guidance" and sort by Last Updated. 

Or maybe wait until someone else has tried and and confirmed it all works.

[Edu-IT]

On 03/07/2026 at 07:24, psydii said:

Have you seen the new login screen? It appears to default to two options only, 365 or Google. This bodes well, can only assume the new onboarding flow is streamlined to 3rd party SSO.

 

The current flow is certainly not intuitive, though I did have someone complete it correctly without supervision the other day. There’s a first time for everything, I guess.

Am I right in thinking this isn't the default yet?

[psydii]

It requires action by an administrator on the parentpay/sims platform and action by an admin of 365/Entra.  They have mentioned a date in late(ish) September where things will get sticky if you haven't enabled it, but given other date slipages over the last few months, that might be at least a little elastic, for now.

The way it is presented is "the DfE mandate this now", so it seems pretty likely it will be the default pretty soon.  I can't really test it comprehensively as we already had sign-in via 365 set up so we've got no users to migrate from SIMSID to 365. I'm keeping an eye on the authentication logs to see if people's authentication seamlessly moves over from the SIMSID app to the "ParentPay Group SSO", but its the summer so there's almost nobody around using it.

[Edu-IT]

I can’t see where to enable the new SSO in the SIMS portal. So is it a case of waiting until they turn it on?

[psydii]

Looks like they're going live.  There was a banner link on the login page for me today that took me through a page with the following:

 

Moving to ParentPay Group SSO

We're moving to ParentPay Group SSO, our new single sign-in across our products.

ParentPay Group SSO will help us:

• Give schools one sign-in across our products
• Improve security
• Make admin work simpler

A Work Account-First Approach

ParentPay Group SSO takes a work account-first approach. This aligns with wider guidance from the DfE, ICO, and NCSC to use managed school accounts (i.e. their Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 accounts). This enables schools to control and manage staff access to systems and data more strictly and safely. We therefore encourage schools to use their Microsoft or Google school accounts wherever possible, and we have designed ParentPay Group SSO to make this easy.

What Your School Must Do

To use Microsoft or Google sign-in, your school must ensure that ParentPay Group SSO access is granted in your Microsoft or Google tenant."

[David44]

Has anyone managed to use SSO with SIMS Next Gen yet? We haven't rolled SIMS Next Gen out to staff yet and it would be good to go straight to SSO rather than the old SIMS ID system.

Most of the documentation seems to just be singing the praises of SSO as if Parent Pay have just discovered it or invented it but there doesn't seem to be anything about how to enable it.

[ThatBoringBloke]

Taken from their Support Page:

Audience

Staff Users

Instructions

1. Sign in to id.sims.co.uk with your existing SIMS ID account.
2. Click 'Hello {name}' at the top right of the SIMS ID Launcher screen.
3. Click 'My Profile'.
4. Click Login & Communication Preferences | Choose either Google or Microsoft.
   
    
5. Click 'Add (either Google or Microsoft) Account' and enter your credentials for your chosen account.
   • Add Google Account
     
   • Add Microsoft Account
     
6. Once completed, log out of SIMS ID, and then back in after clicking on the Google or Microsoft icons on the login page
   

[psydii]

We're finding the transition from the very manual way of getting SSO working to the new automated way a little rough.  I think they might not be actually lighting up the new auth flow as default for another couple of weeks.

If none of your users are using SSO just yet, set it up per the instructions, ping your account manager and  wait for them to  confirm its fully live before testing it with a few users.

[David44]

Those instructions are just for linking a Google or Microsoft account to an existing SIMS ID account, something that has been possible to do for a while (and Facebook, Apple and Twitter at one time IIRC).

I don't think we have an account manager and I haven't seen any instructions on how to set it up yet. I suspect all schools will move to the new SSO sign in page at the same time since we all share the same sign in page, the system doesn't know what school you are from until you have signed in.

The KB seems to be an advert for SSO rather than containing any useful information at the moment.

[psydii]

I think you are missing something. The new process complete removes the current (janky) flow to link accounts to external authentication systes.

 

All NEW users need to do is (on the new logon page) click the "logon with 365" or "logon with Google" buttons. That action triggers the sending of a verification code which they enter and, voila they are logged on to the webapp.

 

Future logons don't require the auth code (though MFA might be required if that's how you've configured Entra/365 or Google).

 

But first the sims and google/365 admin need to liaise to set up the new "app" (enterprise app in 365/entra parlance) as per the KB articles mentioned above.  I got to go through this flow again today when I logged onto id.sims.co.uk. 

 

However, users are not yet seeing the new streamlined logon page.

[David44]

On 04/09/2026 at 17:25, psydii said:

But first the sims and google/365 admin need to liaise to set up the new "app" (enterprise app in 365/entra parlance) as per the KB articles mentioned above.  I got to go through this flow again today when I logged onto id.sims.co.uk. 

We will be using Google for SSO. Correct me if I am wrong but I can't see that ParentPay have released the App ID that we will need to grant access to the relevant scopes for SSO yet. We should be okay as we allow staff users to use SSO with anything that only requires the basic data needed for Sign in with Google so unless ParentPay have requested more than an email address in their app, it should just work.

It would be nice to know though since if you asked Parent Pay, they would probably say that SSO have been available for years but we all saw what a ham fisted way they implemented their previous attempt. Hopefully they have got it right this time but with a lack of useful information coming from Parent Pay, that's all I have, hope.

[psydii]

Dunno. Just followed the guide in the KB articles (and also as prompted via id.sims.co.uk) and this set up the new ParentPay App inside EntraID-Entrprise Applications.  I assume the equivalent flow for Google is triggered the same way. 

To me it is very clear that the intention of this new  SSO via  a new app registration  is to allow single sign-on as we (and DfE) expect rather than taking the spiteful path TES have chosen.