JoeS

Thank you Sally, I will get only my own service desk to see what the next step might be. Thats very helpful.

This isn't really MIS related, but I couldn't find a more appropriate forum. I am generating ULNs for our Y9 using the LRS. It turns out a student was given a temporary UPN in Y5 when joining primary school, and LRS initially wouldn't let me create a ULN until I removed the UPN completely from the box. All of their census data since Y5 and KS2 data is on the temporary UPN. Looking at GIAP I can see their proper UPN that was used pre Y5 and for KS1 data. What are the implications of changing the UPN back to what it should be 4 years after the temp UPN was issued? Thanks

I am a data manager for a secondary school. We were told we were going to migrate from SIMS to Bromcom over Easter, which seemed like a great time to me. Apart from Exams it is a quiet time of year, and we would have the whole summer term to iron out any teething problems. Now we have been told that the migration date is potentially moving to be over the summer holidays so we will start using Bromcom for the first time on the first day of term in September. This seems like the worse possible time to do it, as it will be the busiest time of the year for most people, all the reports and functionality that people are used to using in SIMS will be totally different or non existent so everything will take twice as long (or worse!), and everyone will have forgotten all their training over the summer holiday. I am worried that we are setting ourselves up for an extremely stressful period of time. Am I right? Or worrying over nothing? Should I try and push back on this date and see if it can be changed? If the powers that be decide on a September migration, is there anything we can do to make it less painful? Many thanks

Hello, I am in the process of attempting to get rid of decades of old data in our SIMS database in preparation for a move to Bromcom. We have not done any housekeeping within the last few years I don't think. I have already managed to delete a load of old student data for student over 25 (over 30 if SEN). Plus deleted almost all the previous years admission records and admission groups. And then deleted the resulting unlinked contacts. A few questions I have is: 1. We still have 9.5K contacts. Running a report, there appear to be a number of contacts with no student relationships and no applicant relationships. But they are not appearing in the unlinked contacts screen? Does this mean they have relationships with perhaps staff or agents? Designing a report with Contacts as the focus, I see no subreports allowing me to list staff or agent relationships? Why else might they not be appearing in unlinked contacts? 2. Should I try and run the address tidy and/or merge routine? I don't think this has been done for years. I ran the reports from the wizard without actually running the routine and it came up with 19K rows for the tidy report and 2.8K rows for the merge report. A lot of the rows in the tidy report just said <> which I assume will be helpful to clean old data. But I don't understand where this address is being stored if the "Residents" columns says ? How long might this take to run? 3. Is there any tidying I can do on the document side of things? Apart from individual reports, we have a lot of documents relating to SEN for SEN students and equally lots of medial issues documents for those with medical issues. Is it right that these will need to be downloaded from SIMS, and then uploaded to Bromcom? Will the SEN documents and Medical documents need to be uploaded to specific SEN and Medical document storage areas in Bromcom? Or flagged somehow that they are to do with SEN or Medical? And if anyone has any "must do" SIMS tidying when preparing for a Bromcom migration, please let me know! Many thanks

Hello, We recently got SIMS Discover working again. However in SIMS there are loads of old discover groups that are totally out of date, and not in Discover itself. How do we get rid of all the old discover groups in SIMS? Many thanks,

Is there any software out there that is able to take on the functions of SIMS Exams Organiser? Or even some of the functions? Apparently our old Exams officer was manually writing down all the access arrangements for students on the seating plans. Even trying to export the seating plans to do something more useful with it, results in the most bonkers, full of random gaps, CSV file I've ever seen. Any other software offerings out there? Surely this can't be the only way of doing things for SIMS users? Many thanks

Thank you, I suspected this was the case. Good to have it confirmed.

Hello, I am a Data Manager at a secondary school. We have long had an "Access Arrangements" aspect in Assessment Manager which appears on many marksheets so that teachers are aware of the needs of the students. I don't have much to do with Exams, but have recently realised that in Exams Organiser there is a section called "Special Arrangements" in the candidate details section. What is happening at the moment is that a spreadsheet is being maintained by the SENCO and Exams Officer with all the Access Arrangements details. I am then copying these details into the Access Arrangements aspect in Assessment Manager, and the exams officer is copying all the details into Exams Organiser. A horrible case of double entry, plus the master information being held on a spreadsheet so everything in SIMS is never up to date. I have been trying to get the contents of this spreadsheet into a Marksheet, specifically so the Access Arrangements aspect is being kept up to date in SIMS. But this is still separate from the Exams Organiser data, which is a duplicate. I have noticed that the "Special Arrangements" entered in Exams Organiser do appear in the SEN section of SIMS in a student's profile under 12 Exams Access Arrangements, but I have not seen them appear anywhere else in SIMS. Is there any way to get all this data in one place? Or the Exams Organiser information into a Marksheet? Many thanks.

Many thanks both, I like the idea of a UDF checkbox!

I am taking over tracking who is Pupil Premium from my ex colleague. Our school currently has no children in care, but a few who are post looked after. They are currently correctly identified in the post looked after arrangements area of SIMS for the census. However, none of them are coming up as "Ever in Care" on SIMS because it seems the "welfare" section of the student profile was never filled in. I like thing to be "right" in SIMS, but is it worth trying to find out care details (care authority / start / end date etc etc) for these 5-6 students? Just so when I run an "Ever in Care" report they appear? Will not having the in care details affect anything else? Is reporting them just for the census enough? Thanks

After a bit of research it seems like this is expected behaviour from SIMS?! If I create a template with a nested if then else formula review column, that colours cells in the formula column - and then ends with "Also colour this column" (with aspect column name).... Apparently this then permanently staples the colour to the results in that aspect/results set. So if I want to used that aspect/results set in a totally separate template months later, and this time I don't want those results to be coloured in (because they are not the focus of this new template), there is nothing I can do as that colour is now permanently baked into the results? Is there a way to either colour results in a column in a non permanent way? Or is there a way to easily clear the colours in a load of columns? (without having to make them all non-read only and then selecting each column manually and right clicking "clear column colour"??) This seems like a mad way for SIMS to behave? Why would I want a result to permanently be a certain colour? What if I want to used that result in another template where the colour should not be there?

I created a historic template last year which colours in cells in a column based on a nested if then else formula. Now I have come to create a totally different template, which just so happens to use one of the same aspects as in the historic template, and for some reason the colours I applied in the historic template are still appearing in the cells for this aspect?? Why is this happening, and can I get rid of this colouring? Many thanks,

OK, it turns out it's not crashing - but just taking 10-15 minutes to save the change!

Any ideas why SIMS might be crashing every time I try and add a teacher as a supervisor in course manager? TIA

In SIMS is it possible to create a group of students (in user defined groups for example), based on whether an aspect says "Y" or "N"? Many thanks.