SIMS .Net user accounts

[Chuckster]

Former colleague who's a HoD for IT curriculum reaches out if I could help his son who is currently the IT technician at a school where they both work at (not a school I've ever worked for). I reluctantly agreed as I know the HoD wouldn't have reached out unless it was absolute necessary. Note, I've been out of the education game for 4+ years so my knowledge is a little rusty re SIMS.

 

The situation...

 

The school joined a MAT 6 years ago and replaced SIMS .Net with Bromcom as a requirement. It's been explained to me that the school is left to manage their own IT to some degree.

 

The school has an urgent requirement to access data that's contained within SIMS. I've guided the techie to restore SIMS from a backup to a VM.

 

The school has the password written down but the former IT manager didn't state which account it was for. The code below reveals all the user accounts and I could see the 'sysman' account exists. Slight problem - the password doesn't work. I could see other user accounts with their generated passwords, which the techie was successful logging into. However, this gives limited data. 

 

USE [sims]
GO

SELECT [user_id]
      ,[person_id]
      ,[login_name]
      ,[password_valid]
      ,[password_generated]
      ,[last_accessed]
      ,[language_id]
      ,[preferences]
      ,[favourites]
      ,[asm_view_exams]
      ,[asm_exams_available]
      ,[suser_sid]
  FROM [sims].[db_user]
GO

 

 

Is there a way of resetting the sysman account, or at least another user account (not an admin account) which the HoD believes has the relevant permissions to access the necessary data the school is seeking?

 

[Devaleth]

The honest answer is that you will likely need to reach out to ESS...but I am not sure if I would advise that.

 

The complication here is that on ending our contracts with SIMS, we are told to delete all installs, databases etc as part of that process. They would otherwise have had to made some other contractual arrangements to retain this.

 

Obviously the attitude (and ownership) of SIMS was in a different place 6 years ago as to how it is now, but I would be concerned that this could open the school up to potential legal action the moment they get in touch with ESS.

[DrBeaker]

As per @Devaleth there was MASSIVE legal complications regarding accessing SIMS etc post-Bromcom move from ESS.

 

This needs to be an SLT issue.

Then they'd also be a question of how valid is the data on such an old sysem/copy?

Was it not migrated across to Bromcom during the process?

 

 

 

[Chuckster]

I've advised the HoD and the techie to reach out to ESS. The information the school wants is pertaining to a former pupil that left in 2015 - and in their SIMS records are documents that they need to access.