SIMS 2010 Spring Release Withdrawn

[AyatollahPies]

*** SIMS 2010 Spring Release Withdrawn

Dear Colleagues,

 

 

 

An issue has been identified in the SIMS 2010 Spring Release which will cause the Quick Letter Template file on the SIMS workstation in the Program files\SIMS\SIMS .net directory to be overwritten with the Capita default template when the workstation update is applied. This is due to a problem in the SIMSApplicationSetup.exe although this issue will not occur if your Quick Letter Template files are stored under the \My Documents directory instead.

 

 

 

For those schools who have already taken the release and run SIMSApplicationSetup.exe, regrettably the personalised templates will either have to be recovered from a backup or re-created as these templates will have been overwritten.

 

 

 

We have therefore taken the decision to temporarily withdraw the SIMS 2010 Spring release to prevent this issue from affecting more users.

 

 

 

We have resolved the issue and a revised version of the SIMSApplicationSetup.exe is currently in test and we aim to release the SIMS 2010 Spring Release onto SOLUS by COB today – Wednesday 21st April. Customers who have not yet applied this release or have taken an ISO image should wait to apply this update.

 

 

 

Further details will be made available later today containing details on how to apply this fix.

 

 

 

We apologise for any inconvenience that this issue will cause. Please feel free to email me ([email protected]) or Steven Law ([email protected]) if you want to discuss this further

 

Ooopsies, as my Girlfriends little one says.

[leco]

Bummer - this was installed by the LA on Monday:( Guess I'd better check it tomorrow. Thanks for the heads up

[glennda]

Did you get that direct from capita? I wonder how long until out LEA actually tells us not to run the update!

 

Toby

[AyatollahPies]

Did you get that direct from capita? I wonder how long until out LEA actually tells us not to run the update!

 

Toby

 

Top news item on the front of Capita Suportnet. Unless your LEA check it they might not know. We usually get emails from Capita about such things.

[Sarconia]

The Spring release has been out for quite a while now! I wonder how long it took for anyone to notice this problem?

 

I've not had any of the schools I support report it to me... but then again, it's only been applied to the Primay schools that we support so far. If it were the secondaries, I bet I'd have been inundated with angry calls from customers whose favourite saying is "Think Again!".

[Jamman960]

This rings a bell, I'm sure another release did the exact same thing in the past?

 

We hadn't noticed this bug but have found an issue with Fee's billing which won't be fixed until the next release as its a client issue...wonder if they could sort that out now they've had to pull the release anyway As they've now decided to go with 4 releases per year we've got a while to wait and as yet theres no release date other than "Summer 2010" argh

Edited April 21, 2010 by Jamman960

[creese]

Speechless

[joe90bass]

oh joy......................

[Cache]

ooops, guess nobody did a Quick Letter today then..... Will be fun when they notice.

 

Guess I better see if it's still on my memory pen.

[dhicks]

An issue has been identified in the SIMS 2010 Spring Release which will cause the Quick Letter Template file on the SIMS workstation in the Program files\SIMS\SIMS .net directory to be overwritten with the Capita default template when the workstation update is applied.

 

I thought storing any file that's meant to be end-user editable in Program Files was a silly idea anyway, so I wrote a Python Windows service that replicates a Quick Letter Template file from a separate file share to the SIMS server (and TS servers where out SIMS clients run), so we avoid this being a problem.

 

--

David Hicks

[the_quick]

Thanks for that post. I just came to school in the evening to do this update and surprise when solus reported "no updates" lol

 

Shame LEA did not informed me

 

Oopsie daisy

 

Why I'm not surprised ?!

[PhilNeal]

To be fair to your LA we didn't confirm until this afternoon. Upgrade turned off until corrected version released - hence "no updates"

[glennda]

good job we where having trouble upgrading to SQL 2008 otherwise I would have upgraded on Monday!

[creese]

Is there any point in re-running the upgrade or is the damage already done?

[Janit]

Creese, from what I gather the damage is already done.

 

I would've preferred the option of going with the upgrade 'as is' though as we could've warned users to make a backup of the quickletter before applying the upgrade. Not sure how many schools make use of the quickletter but pretty sure it's not the majority. We could've emailed everyone to ask if they wanted the newer version and released it on request. We support 300+ schools and approx 120 had already installed it. It's been automatically withdrawn so now we have the task of releasing the new version to all schools and then removing it from the ones who already have it. Nice.

[creese]

One point of view on Supportnet, which makes sense, is that if the SimsApplicationSetup is re-run it will recreate the problem. Probably not worth the risk.

[ChrisJ]

Just as well we held this back from Birmingham schools. Have put the new release on the mirror now, will authorise it in a couple of days.

[Sarconia]

Couldn't anyone just find a workstation which hasn't been upgraded (I'm sure there'd be one in a fair few schools, especially as Staff have been on half term holiday and probably haven't even logged into SIMS yet) and then copy the Quick Letter Template back over to all of the other workstations which have been upgraded?

[vikpaw]

We hadn't noticed this bug but have found an issue with Fee's billing which won't be fixed until the next release as its a client issue...wonder if they could sort that out now they've had to pull the release anyway As they've now decided to go with 4 releases per year we've got a while to wait and as yet theres no release date other than "Summer 2010" argh

 

Please can you expand on the Fees Billing issue as we use it extensively and a heads up would be useful, i'd rather hold off the upgrade if it's going to be painful.

ta.

[vikpaw]

@Jamman960

BUMP

[matt40k]

Couldn't anyone just find a workstation which hasn't been upgraded (I'm sure there'd be one in a fair few schools, especially as Staff have been on half term holiday and probably haven't even logged into SIMS yet) and then copy the Quick Letter Template back over to all of the other workstations which have been upgraded?

 

No, you've missed the point. The Spring release (3) will overwrite the quickletter template in the local SIMS directory with the default Capita one. So if you've added a custom one, say a schools default, you would have had to manually copy it each time, thus having a copy someone else on the network (which would be safe). The idea of the quick letter template is that say, the attendance officer could have a different one to say, the the head teacher.

 

Having said all that, that's all machine-specific, so if you share a computer you can't do that. Capita did however, put in the Autumn(??) release the ability to store them in your My Docs folder, which wouldn't be touched at all!!

 

The re-release (4) just has the bit of code that said, overwrite the local copy changed to copy if does not exist. Nothing else, as far as we the public are aware

[cookie_monster]

How is the spring update looking now I'll be applying in next week?

 

Thanks.

[glennda]

All seems to be okay here with the update.

 

Toby

[Pete10141748]

All's gone fine here too

[ChrisH]

Ours is fine so far.