vikpaw

Agree, the schema is complex. We have some dedicated report writers in-house as it's a lot for a school to pick up unless you have someone very interested/dedicated. Interested to know how you're running the powershell routine. Is it fully cloud, or does it need to be on a pc / vpc? We're looking at how to automate some emails because the built in method is ok, but you have to get them to set it up, and for every change, so it's not really self-service.

Qatar is nice, and pay will be good. Not sure about how 'chill' it is. I think it's a stricter place in general. As with all places it depends on exactly where you are the community you're in etc. Dubai is hectic and some people feel a lot of social pressure, so you'd certainly spend more (%) of your salary, as there's a load more to do. In that sense it might be considered more relaxed in Qatar. Wherever you are there's plenty to do, and i'd highly recommend the middle east. I've got friends in both places and everyone loves it. One minor thing to note is that Qatar, along with Saudi and Bahrain still operates a Sun-Thu week, if that matters. More if you've got family / things back home that you need to stay on top of. Never really bothered me. It could affect you if you wanted to do a quick weekend away which is very easy and nice to do from here.

iSAMS is defo big for international sector. I reckon they've got about 2000 schools. I think the parent company IRIS is building something else for local (UK) state sector.

Check if you can fully manage integrations yourself without having to make a support request to generate an API key. Otherwise it stifles progress and makes key cycling difficult.

You should be able to get SQL access for free (in order to write SSRS reports), albeit via IP Whitelisting. At least I thought it was free. Maybe it's included in our bundle.

The tech stack does need bringing up to date. I think it's a background task. I keep asking for the ability to create my own API keys as I want control, but it's back burner. Having said that, we've worked on a fair bit of custom dev and they've been really good and reactive. I guess it all depends on the powers that be and what direction the product is taking, how they are prioritising the features etc. Lots of energy ploughed in to make it fit for the US with curriculum manager. We're gonna give that a good thrashing.

We use it, I don't have experience directly, but seems to work well. Allows us to link out to our payment system and get data back in. Maybe you can push for new features now TechMonkey cos when we asked for stuff we were told it would only go into the new portal, as that's where the energy was focussed. I know we've been providing feedback on the admissions portal as we're keen to see it includes the ability to manage re-enrolments. They've also just announced a partnership with Stripe which is useful for handling payments. [Not sure if that's public knowledge yet].

Well, EHG kept 2/3 going under their banner for quite some time. I would imagine the best case scenario is they take the best of each and build a central, internationally suitable, core system which can then tap into any other add-on. Faria were/are looking to do similar, but haven't heard much on that front for a while.

Some spring time news. Tes has acquired Education Horizons Group, adding not one but three MIS to their portfolio along with some other products and a heap of customers. https://www.tes.com/for-schools/now-tes/education-horizons EHG who took over DoubleFirst some time ago, adding Engage MIS to their suite, also started work on their new MIS offering Zunia. I was involved in early stages of it and it was pretty amazing, built from the ground up, with a huge team of developers. Now Tes has taken a big step into the MIS market through this acquisition along with Synergetic, EHG's standing school management system, and the other complimentary tools such as Seqta a learning management tool. Engage was pretty all encompassing anyway, but now it has a whole suite of products at its doorstep which adds more choice for schools wanting best in breed add-ons with close integration. Engage || Zunia || Synergetic Exciting times for private and international schools.

100% this ^ . Custom fields can also be tricky as you need to know the ID, but doing a read will pull that down for you. We use this {{baseUrl}}/api/students?page=1&pageSize=1&expand=customFields One school as 30+ custom fields and though we ask for some to be created as standard across the group, they all get a different ID (per instance), so we have to do a read based on field name, before we can update. If you can and it's affordable, i'd ask for a test system where they can clone your data for you. So you can experiment. Most of the work we've done has been on applicants, not on-roll students, so the endpoints are different. I think that custom data might need updating separately. It should all be in the docs. Watch out for field types, and how they might need to be enclosed in quotes or not, and any special characters in your data that could throw out any automated conversion.

Yep, DNS entries are in as they requested and validated. They don't ask for SPF anymore, but gonna try and whitelist a bunch of domains and IPs however we can. EDIT: on second check, SPF is not a requirement as it's covered by using a bespoke subdomain as the return address. Will look into VERP a bit more.

Looked at HVE and it’s only in preview and still quite limited and throttled. its also designed for internal email and external is limited to 2000 I think. The bulk of our user base are in schools who all use their own domains. So class as external. Managed to get a few to route out to Gmail via SMTP2Go thru kindly gave me a limited trial to do a PoC. But some Microsoft filters on our end and at one of the test schools are blocking the routing and sending back a soft bounce so trying to work out what’s going wrong there. Something is impersonating the outbound account as the bounce message is being sent out via the SMTP relay and allowed back in but the original email is blocked. 🙄

Not on prem. All in the cloud, which is why it's harder. The challenge is which smtp relay we use. and if its via a connector, they don't support basic auth. It mentions a smart host could/would work, but wants to challenge via a test email. Currently trying out SMTP2Go who purport to accept relay based on mailbox From email address and an IP whitelist. But i think the connector is interceding as the From and it's not going through.

Tell me more, and will the talk be recorded. Unlikely to make it to glasgow. A few posts have mentioned ACS, but it still seems to be getting the wrong end of the stick. The issue is we want a user to go to their outlook, select two distribution lists (large number of recipients) and hit send. It should be routed out via our chosen SMTP relay (because Microsoft don't support bulk / high volumes). I can see we can build apps, and using code send mail out via the apps, or use Graph etc. Maybe i'm missing something. Is there a worked example out there somewhere....

It supports it via API methods I think. Not sure how to get an app to pick up all sent mail , it gets fiddly. Dynamics is an option but it’s ugly and we wanted something simple for our users. Can it be hooked up as the outbound route on Outlook or would we need to use the UI just benefit from the contacts being in sync?