Alternative to SIMS?

[pran]

FWIG, SIMS seems to dominate the market with no competition at all or am I missing something? Can you recommend an alternative to SIMS that can grow with an organization?

[vikpaw]

Depends on your schools set up / details. Tell us more about your school/location etc. Don't forget to pop your head in the International forum too

 

Being international helps in that you aren't confined to UK legislation which forces sims to require certain fixed updates at inconvenient times.

 

Isams purports to work well for independent schools.

 

This forum's sponsor has a free to schools offering (Scholarpack) but maybe it's only free for the UK - that's probably best placed to develop with you as it's a relatively new offering.

 

Other things to consider are serco, bromcom, phoenix (?). if you search this forum you'll find some others mentioned as this discussion comes up from time to time.

 

It's also worth considering international offerings from the states, but i'd stick to dedicated mis products , often referred to as SIS, because it seems most solutions out there from gradebooks to registration software are expanding to store more and more date and become more MIS like.

Edited January 9, 2011 by vikpaw
correction

[EdWhittaker]

The next biggest player after SIMS is Serco's CMIS / Facility ePortal. After that come RM Integris and Pearson e1, but, tbh, I wouldn't bother with either of those two. We have to work with all 4 of these with our product; e1 was a nightmare (fortunately all of our schools that were using it have dumped it in the last year or so, so we don't work with it all now). 99% of our customer schools use either SIMS or CMIS.

 

I would certainly check out ScholarPack, though. Don't know much about it so can't comment, but I fully support moves both to OS and new kids on the block.

Edited January 10, 2011 by EdWhittaker
added afterthought

[rpwillis]

The next biggest player after SIMS is Serco's CMIS / Facility ePortal. After that come RM Integris and Pearson e1, but, tbh, I wouldn't bother with either of those two.

 

That's just for secondary schools. For primary level I believe Integris G2 and Pearson e1 have a much larger market share than CMIS/Facility. There's quite a few authority wide rollouts.

 

In 2005 the DCSF (as then was) published which systems were used to submit PLASC returns in 2003-2005. You can still get the results from http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/ims/misss/, but I haven't seen an updated one since.

[Ketlane]

Reading between the lines I guess yours is a UK-system international school - if so try SchoolBase - works well and like ISAMS is targeted at the independent market. Incidentally it does the census pretty easily, both for govt and for the ISC.

[ntm1275]

As you are based in the Philippines, RM have an Asia-Pacific region web site, with Management Systems for Independent, Private and International schools

From the site, it appears they can offer Integris G2 or RM Maze/eMaze

 

We use the Integris G2 system in our LEA for both Primary and Secondary, and have no problems with it at all

It is a full web based system and can be hosted by RM, so you don't have to have the extra cost of servers based in the school - All the hardware and software is fully managed by RM, and it was considerable cheaper than either Capita or Serco

Edited January 11, 2011 by ntm1275

[Stuart_C]

One of our new Staff here came from a indy school using ISAMS and he said it was great. I can not attest to the accuacy of this statement though.

[GNewnham]

We use iSAMS (which is great!) - if you want any further information, I would be happy to oblige.

[carvjo]

WCBS is used in quite a few independent schools - Home, Information Management for Schools from WCBS - the fees, billing and accounts bits (PASS module) are said to be especially good..

[CyberNerd]

School Administrative Software for Google Apps