SIMS - Student Teacher View Contact Information

[Stuart_C]

I've just been informed about some "wrong" information is SIMS... When I looked at the Emergency Contact numbers in SIMS student teacher view I notice that there are some descrepancies between that view and the full detials screen.

 

It looks to me that the contacts are listed for the parents as:

Telephone - Mobile - ????????? - Main

Fax - Home - ????????

Telephone - Home - ????????

 

SIMS is then picking up the first entry for "Home" and putting it into the Student Teacher Contact. For some reason it's not picking up "Telephone Home" and putting that it. I've looged it as a fault with Capita and await to see what they come up with. Whislt I wait has anyone else noticed anything like this?

 

When I delete the fax number it displays the correct information and when I put the home fax back in it changes the order the numbers are displayed in the contact record so the home fax comes first. when i then look at student teacher view the fax number is displayed again.

[vikpaw]

good catch!

 

i've not noticed it, but the numbers and emails in SIMS are stored in a strange fashion.

we've taken the decision to start deleting fax numbers because of this, plus we dont use them.

 

unless your query is written correctly, you can't guarantee the correct results.

i saw this when writing my own data collection form - items in a table are sorted by the category/type i.e. home appears before work and is the first line reported back.

 

no doubt this is similar as fax and telephone are stored in the same table (i think), and must be sorted by device so fax appears higher.

 

it something to do with the fact it is looking for the main work number and main home number, and the system doesn't allow you to have both, so it goes to the table and reports the first row, the problem is in the table we have no control over priority, it's arbitrary sorting.

 

i think if you have two work tel numbers they will be sorted by the number itself!

for this reason, we are deleting all secondary work telephone numbers as well.

[Stuart_C]

good catch!

 

unless your query is written correctly, you can't guarantee the correct results.

.

 

Yes... I worried about having to delete things or set "main" all over the place.

 

The problem is that I have no control over the Student teacher view fields. I'll be interested to see what Capita have to say...

[vikpaw]

Yes... I worried about having to delete things or set "main" all over the place.

 

The problem is that I have no control over the Student teacher view fields. I'll be interested to see what Capita have to say...

 

i'm interested too, if it turns out to be a provable error, i guess some kind of patch, or wait until it's included in the next release.

 

i would suggest changing your data collection policy and not bothering with fax numbers unless you really use them. we have collected them for years but they get used for maybe one or two families on rare occasions, so i said we'll call up and ask if we need it for one off uses, so now we remove them.

[Stuart_C]

Vic,

If you are interested, Capita just called. When I showed them it happening the guy I was talking too seemed stumped for the minute. However at least I was able to prove it in action which is good.

 

We proved, which I guessed would happen, that if you set the home number as "main" then it works OK. However this is a problem if the promary contact number, I.e. the number the parents want you to try them on, is NOT their home number. So I was having none of that. So it's off to the escallation team.

 

I hope you don't mind but I did mention that "someone at anotehr school had noticed the problem" though i didn't mention you by name.

[vikpaw]

Thanks for the update Stuart.

 

You are welcome to mention my name and school if you wish. I logged a call regarding my data collection form problems and pointed out the issue in the way the database worked. I also posted a few things in their forums under schoolcomms and data collection forms.

 

Anyway, there are plenty of lurkers here, and we're hardly keeping things secret are we

[Stuart_C]

I did realise that buy hey...

[PhilNeal]

I've had this checked out.

 

The Teacher’s View displays a maximum of three contact telephone numbers if there is only one Priority 1 contact and for some reason if there is a Home Fax number, it displays the Fax number instead of the Home telephone number.

 

This is a bug that needs to be resolved.