bobsmith

Is the question bromcom specific or are you trying to come up with an assessment structure that fits from EYF to KS5?

I trained up an assistant head with zero timetabling experience to use Edval in a matter of weeks during his "free" periods. Funnily enough the most effort went into teaching him the basics of timetabling rather than using the software - that part is pretty intuitive and nothing like the learning curve of using Nova-T6. The closest he got to timetabling prior to this was rearranging an excel spreadsheet of the current timetable without formulae. He did start doing some official training on Nova and then swore he'd never timetable if he had to use it - I never blamed him. As for Edval - after we got a workable curriculum plan and staffing allocations figured out (no need for timetable software at that stage) - the algorithms they use actually produced a decent timetable in about 2hours.....

well it looks like it was something at parentpay's end as they replied that it "should be fixed now". No further explanation given.... It was indeed working again without any action by us.

then the follow up error is this:

Good morning all I was happily validating addresses for my new applicants yesterday but as of this morning myself (data manager) and another user are both getting an error when trying to use the address validation service. Anyone else had this and have a fix?

If SBS can't raise a case with ESS then can you still do it directly? You can go through your SIMS account manager if there is no one in school with credentials.

The IP issue that ParentPay has been chucking around when it comes to MIS migrations is primarily related to SQL Stored Procedures (that nobody is actually interested in....). An XML export is essentially a flat data file similar to a CSV or XLS (or even a notepad doc!) and even ParentPay would struggle to justify to themselves that this is a propriety format. We did an .SPL to .etz migration back in November and it wasn't raised back then.

Parentpay support are the only people that you should be getting direction from on this. When we did the migration and had to do the initial matching up exercise they provided excellent support on this process. Since this can affect balances and lead to unhappy parents it's worth putting the time in to get this right.

the MIS you use will have some influence on the system you use. what MIS are you currently running? we're currently SIMS with ipay - but I've used parentpay with both SIMS and Bromcom in the past and it works reasonably well.

I could swear we had a meeting about SIMS 8 back before 2010! Next Gen is actually a much more recent product - I think SIMs 8 was finally killed off in 2021 and NextGen was launched as it's replacement.

if you aren't in a MAT then you won't have access to vision (which has a much more comprehensive feed) - but you can pay for it - I never got to the point of getting a price though. I still think they need to make the datasets the same though - not everyone is in a bloody academy chain.

1. get a copy of the SQL database direct from ESS themselves* * if you're on prem that's super easy - if you are hosted by them then it used to be easy - until they lost so much market share that they got super reluctant to hand it over 2. use Wonde to export as much as it has access to 3. run reports to find all the data and export to excel then reimport - note that the reporting tree can't necessarily see everything in the database.....

I can't honestly remember when SIMS was the cheap option...

in which case it should just be a matter of switching developer mode on - doing the find and replace, switching developer mode OFF again.... then saving the report. when I was last using on-prem it worked beautifully for doing this.

a 12 year old necro post is quite impressive! that said - are you using sims hosted or you still have on-prem sims? Cos on hosted they've disabled the developer tab so there's no one of editing the tags directly. What used to be a 2 minute job updating reports now takes approximately forever and introduces a lot of checking as you're effectively rebuilding from scratch.