jtcoops

We look after businesses as well as schools. One of our clients got hacked by Dragon Force - the scumbags behind Jaguar Landrover and M&S hacks - which we intercepted just in time and in the process managed to get their payload and encryptor tools out of quarantine (Avast Cloudcare) - all of which have been handed to the police. Out of interest I just did a virustotal on the payload exe file. 62 out of 72 engines detect ransomware, Microsoft Defender and Malwarebytes detect Dragon Force ransomware. Sophos gives the file a big green tick! Yep its one of the 10 that is totally oblivious to what is now becoming the most prolific ransomware. If you are relying on Sophos to protect endpoints alone get something like Threatdown installed as well asap.

Bear in mind FMS has been in schools for 15 years or more and would originally have been under a Capita contract, signed by staff members in most case long since departed, along with the changes introduced by ESS when they forced schools into a 3 year contract I'm not surprised so many schools are being caught out. Its not as though ESS resend the contract every renewal - they just silently renew it. Unfortunately my opinion stands regardless of what is in the contract, holding school data ransom, particularly financial data is pretty scummy. Sage aren't known for being overly friendly provide read only access if you cancel licenses for Sage Accounts. Quickbooks hosted provide read only access for 12 months. Even Sun accounts provides read only access or allows export of data, which ESS prevent on the basis it infringes their IP rights - bear in mind this is IP that is nearly 20 years old with code held together with digital sellotape.

ESS will make it as hard as possible for you in any way you try and cancel services. The very fact that the data within FMS is legally your data, and there is a legal requirement to be able to access it for 6 years, ESS' approach is that to do that you must pay them the full subscription including Sims regardless of whether you need it or not for those 6 months otherwise they will lock you out of your data. It needs a collective of schools to oppose this, go up against them in court, and get the government and media notified about this brutal scam they are running. There is a way to maintain access to your data - it needs some lateral thinking, and a bit of creativity. I can't post any more details of the workaround here as ESS scour these forums being the gutter rats that they are.

Hi We have recently moved over to Chromebooks in the classroom rather than PCs in an IT suite. What are people using to view pupils screens? We used to have software on the ICT suite PC that allowed us to view what was on the pupils' screens, mostly to make sure they weren't off topic and on a game page rather than the assigned task. Is there something we can deploy similarly on Chromebooks that will give the teacher of each class the ability to pull up a pupil's screen without having to physically go and look?

Thank you so much for your help. We keep finding little gems left behind by the previous IT Manager and this is firmly in that category. Ive updated and closed the ticket.

Sure. It is 653806

Hi thanks for this. So the components failing to load are in the snip below, this covers the initial page, login page for email, then after the login is processed

One of our schools are with LGFL and use their School Protect filter. They have an issue which doesn't affect our other schools under LGFL, and having raised this issue with LGFL there hasn't been any real progress in resolving. Since March and the latest update of Chrome / Edge certain websites simply will not load properly. They either time out completely, or load a very basic text only version. At the moment if we use Firefox the sites load up as normal. If we run an old version of Chrome the sites load fine. New version and the issue returns. It started with just one website but we are finding more sites are getting affected. The attached gives a screen shot. The top is how the site renders on new devices running Chrome released since March. The bottom is how it displays on old installs of Chrome (test environment). However if we join one of the PCs to a wifi hotspot the sites load fine, so its not a Chrome issue as such, its a rendering / block by an element of the site via the web filter. Has anyone encountered this and can give a steer on how we fix it? Affects Wifi and LAN connected devices. Chrome issue.docx

There is a way around this to get access to your data. I'm wary of posting it here as ESS are scummy enough to be trawling these forums looking for schools who have migrated from Sims to Arbor with a view to making accusations of how the data has been transferred, so its not beyond them to monitor this thread as well. Aftab - we worked together years ago at Stockley - not sure I can DM you here but if there is a way of you letting me know how I can contact you direct I can give you the insights to how you can do your year end and not pay ESS anything further.

We've signed up for support with a third party as even when a human gets involved with Arbor it takes far too long to actually get a resolution to a problem. It may be a cost saving to Arbor to frontline with a bot, but it's not a cost saving for schools that need issues resolved quickly. Even if they had a support team on hand for the first few weeks after going live it would save a lot of grief as generally that is when more assistance is needed after a migration.

Yes. ESS Nuked FMS remotely at midnight on the day of contract expiry. Luckily we did a snapshot of the VM the day before as had to do a VAT return and run off CFR reports. Basically ESS deny you access to your own data, despite it being a legal requirement to be able to access 6 years of finance information on demand by HMRC. The only work around is to sign a new 3 year contract to include SIMS FMS and Parentpay - which they are now bolting in. We have moved to Arbor and don't use parent pay. Another school down the road which has maintained FMS despite moving to Arbor and dropping parent pay 3 years ago has just received their renewal - £9,000 per year rather than the £1600 they were paying just for FMS. Its time schools partnered up against this appalling company. The government needs to wake up to this company robbing schools of tax payers money.

Will you be keeping FMS now they have doubled the price to cover the Sims you no longer use as well? This has caught a number of schools by surprise at a time when budgets are cut to the bone. ESS really are digging their own ending with this tactic.

We just received the below from ESS On-premise: As a result of your cancellation, access to locally installed SIMS and/or FMS software and database will be disabled at 07:00 on Monday 7 April 2025 (where it is not under a valid live contract effective from 1 April 2025). Is this just bluster or do they have a way of nuking the database remotely? We do not have direct support from ESS. Given there is no way to transfer historical data from FMS this puts us in direct breach of HMRC regulations to have access to 6 years worth of accounts. I get they own the IP for the database but the data is ours? It is already a VM so I can make additional copies and keep it sandboxed but given we are migrating 31/3/25 we need to retain access into the next financial year for vat returns etc. We have already moved to Arbor, FMS is going to Access. The intention was remove FMS from all devices but keep a local install on the SQL server VM which we would power on when required to run post year end reports for the local authority and for the vat etc.

We went all in replacing Sims, Cypad for lunches and Parentpay which was probably too much for them, despite the sales team assurances. 8 days on teachers still can't order lunches for their classes - the admin team are having to do it, and we still have entire classes that keep disappearing from the lunch system. We are having to use spreadsheets which is ridiculous and then manually debiting parent accounts. We had an email from them Friday saying they were looking into the issue. Another on Monday saying they would be looking into the issue and since then silence and no responses to any of our other queries.