paulkerton

You hit the nail on its head. Yes, flexibility and configurability of assessment and behaviour models is for me what puts two companies apart. We use Bromcom and it has been excellent for us for these reasons. There is a blog which talks about the Harris Federation experience of the same two MIS products and extract below where problem also exist for primary schools: https://link.medium.com/HIYsoEoGDgb

How many do that live on the fly and instantly? Most do that overnight, and also do it one way, leaving your MIS as the single source of truth. For example, I have my secondary school MIS push data in Google (Users/Calendars/Groups) overnight. I can manually trigger one if I need to. Doing so every time a change is made instantly would be a huge resource drain and send SIMS to a grinding halt. Are these parts they're talking about also going to write back, or are they going to be read-only? If you're writing back, you really don't want two interfaces to place the same data into your database, because you're asking for accidental data overwrites and edit clashes. If you're switching between a web interface and the SIMS 7 interface, you're basically going to upset staff with all the switching. Also, if its the people who created the ParentPay UI doing this work, then I don't hold out much hope of getting a modern interface that has continual tweaks and changes. ParentPay has been stuck with the same look and design and confusing menus for a decade.

Conversely most of the admin staff I've worked with are really unhappy with SIMS and would like to go to other solutions, but it's management (or in particular business managers) who are likely to drag their feet because of their comfort with FMS, so they don't want to move to better systems. Phasing a solution is a really bad way to do development, especially when so much of the solution is still built on a 36 year old code base.

I can't believe I'm liking one of your posts, considering how comabative me and you can be! This is exactly what they've been having issue with, I believe. Because SIMS Primary/SIMS 8 is not functionally identical they're getting negative feedback on that and reacting, rather than biting the bullet. Their idea seems to be that they can seed section by section over time, and move people over that way. Which is almost exactly how the move to SIMS 7/.net happened. Bit by bit. Inch by inch.

SIMS 8 was announced March 30th 2017. 1695 days ago. Another three years from today to have it delivered would get us to 2790 days. It'll be 2922 days if we say three years from our renewals. To put this in context. JFK announced the moon landing on 12th September 1962 and 2499 days later man landed on the moon. London won the Olympic Games on 6th July 2005 and the opening ceremony was 27th July 2012, 2578 days later. So a city can organise the biggest sporting event on Earth and a country can land a man on the surface of another object in our solar system over 50 years ago, faster than a company can develop a new web based solution for their product. That time frame isn't since they started developing it either - its since they decided to announce it. No wonder they gave up going to BETT. ESS was purchased by Montagu Private Equity. ParentPay were invested into by Montagu Private Equity. ParentPay took over ESS and Montagu has taken a significant minority stake in ParentPay Group. I would assume enough to have a significant sway in the decisions the company makes moving forward. I cannot imagine Montagu spent that significant amount of money on SIMS because they wanted to give ParentPay Group a gift. So I don't know how they'd define "not equity backed", but its certainly a different definition than mine.

Chrome Sign Builder is the way I've always done it! Then you just update the Slides as you go. Paul.

No, the migration didn't take 3 months, the whole process did, including meeting each MIS provider did. The answer is to attempt to speed up the process and not take 3 months to do it. Look what we all managed during the March to Easter window last year in terms of IT. A crisis made of questionable tactics could produce something special again.

Hi TheRegister! Would've been nice if you'd asked before quoting me fellas, but I'm OK with that particular quote

I would assume competitors will have to head to the Competition and Markets Authority. Afterall, a monopoly is considered by them to be anyone who has over 25% of the market.... and ESS SIMS has 70%.... and then they're trying to tie people down for three years to eliminate any competition in that period...

Very strange - That is working just fine for me.

I don't know why they're using the TV ratings in this article. The entire series 3 of Ghosts was put onto iPlayer on demand. People will have binged that right up!!

Text to speech isn't built into Google Docs, you're just turning on the accessibility options so that your text to speech software either built into the OS or a third party software can use it without any quirks or issues with menus, on-screen comments etc. I've just tested it with the built in text to speech on ChromeOS and it's working for me. Have you turned on ChromeVox (if you're using a chromebook I mean)

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - Enjoyed it, despite the "Ahhhh CG everywhere, whats going on? I can't tell whats happening" typical ending. Good performances across the board. Fun cameo in it too. Jungle Cruise - Fun. Better than it had any right to be - Ridiculously Indiana Jonesy - about 20 minutes too long.

It's been a while since I had to be directly involved with SIMS. What parts of it could you move to Teams?

Are you using something like Docusign? It would be the same process as multiple signatures, other than you'd have to get them into the same room. Most contracts don't need witnessing in England anyway. Do you do it to drive home the importance of the contract?

Morrisons, Zoom, HSBC, Santander, NatWest, Waitrose all reporting issues this morning.

Just starting a thread for this. Seems like the internet in Europe is very flaky today. Google having trouble, as are Microsoft, iCloud and Visa and Mastercard according to Down Detector today. Seem like a wider issue than just Google.

Today's probably not the best day. European Internet seems to be very flaky today. Google, Microsoft, Visa, Mastercard and many others expriencing some weird disruptions today.

Google are reporting issues with multiple services across Europe Which is interesting because Down Detector is showing similar spikes at the same time for Visa, Mastercard, iCloud, Zoom, Outlook, Waitrose and Office 365... https://downdetector.co.uk/

So back on topic... Has anyone else gone to block Discord from their email systems? I have done so, but I know several students decided to use their school account to sign up anyway, so no doubt if they need a password reset in the future they might get upset at the lack of password reset emails appearing!

I guess: Make the move to cancel and move before your end of contract date. Speak to your legal teams. And with the first one I mean that you have till the end of your current term (which I assume is end of March) to move if you cancel by 31st December. You're just going to have a run procurement quickly... Easier to do if your costs won't hit the ceiling for a tender I suppose.

Which isn't true on the whole. Per school they have gone from 78% market share in Q3 2018 to 70% in Q2 2012. Per pupils its dropped from 82% to 75% in that period. If schools are coming back to them, then they're getting a very small percentage compared to the total leaving and not returning. https://bringmoredata.blogspot.com/2021/07/mis-market-update-sims-dip-below-70.html

SIMS Connected is exactly the same as Hosted SIMS, except they've turned on the HTML 5 RDP client. It's just a rebranding exercise. Which is exactly the opposite of their intentions. *Womp womp*

No it wasn't. You're being deliberately obtuse. Any server can be added to the school hub. Any. This system specifically well let them find random people on the internet who aren't their school friends, because they can add any server they like to the school hub.

Just so everyone is aware of the facts, rather than evidence less conjecture. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-Discord-Student-Hubs-FAQ A Discord Student Hub is a place for students to meet classmates from their school. Each hub is only accessible to users with an email address associated with that school. Students will be able to find other classmates that have joined the hub, add their servers to the hub, and find their classmates' servers, all in one place. Are we pretending DMs don't exist? That they can't create a server designed for people just in the student hub? Or that Discord have a way of managing over 18s who have left who previously joined the hub several years previously? Are we pretending someone couldn't point a 4chan server into the student hub? Or a mgtow server? or use it to co-ordinate negative behaviours? Yes, this could all be done via other third party tools, but allowing your email systems to be used to verify membership essentially gives students the facilities to make it really easy to find each other in a third party solution - that is crazy. We shouldn't be allowing third parties to use your systems to essentially build a database of who goes to your school. Could they find each other using your 365, Google etc platform? Yes, but then at least you have some control and logging of what's occurring. It's a safeguarding issue, and there is no other way around that I'm afraid.