Easytrace e-registration

[mb2k01]

Hi All,

 

Do any of you use EasyTrace for e-registration with SIMS Lesson Monitor?

If so, what are your experiences of it?

 

Is it reliable? Are marks always written back? Do you have issues with some marks appearing and others not?

 

As you may guess, I am asking the above as we now have it - but it is not quite living up to the standard we envisaged / should be getting!

(To slightly balance that comment with a bit of positivity, AMI support seem very keen - still working to resolve issues, I'm just interested to see what others who have used the system for longer think)

 

Cheers

[meastaugh1]

Yes, we bought Easyreg (integrates with SIMS lesson Monitor) and Easylock (access control) three years ago. Overall experience hasn't been fantastic, but with Easytrace/AMI's support, and me spending a significant amount of time gathering data, diagnosing etc, it is now mostly a working system.

 

Many of our early problems were related to (or possibly just more easily apparent) the access control system; these were resolved by assigning the server more resources, ensuring the readers are on a VLAN separate from the main network and flashing the readers with the latest firmware.

 

We had more problems when we added eight more readers to the system as part of a refurb last year (6 access control, 2 reg). I found that when new readers were connected to our most common PoE switch (HP 2600-8PWR) they would occassionally drop packets, which is a particularly bad thing on a system that uses UDP to transmit data, with nothing on top to verify transmission. Weirdly, this problem isn't apparent on our more recent HP swithes (E2615-8POE).

 

Our most recent issue is that since the August update (to make it compatible with SIMS 7.140 - .net4), the system seems to be transferring swipes from all our readers, including access control, to SIMS, resulting in students being marked in registers when they shouldn't be. I logged this issue last week and it's now been escalated to development.

 

What's your setup? Have they used the Gemini X1010IP? If so, what are you using to power them? Are the readers dropping packets? Are your readers on a VLAN isolated from lost of broadcast traffic? You could query the SQL database to see/verify what Easytrace is capturing.

Edited September 22, 2011 by meastaugh1