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.

We paid for the support package. We may review that and get a refund as its a shambles. - - - Updated - - - We tried live chat - seems to mostly be the support bot which is not useful in the slightest

Hi Our school went live with Arbor last Monday, and to say it has been painful is an understatement. The biggest issue is the black hole of support that seems to be the case with Arbor. It takes days to get a response - we never seem to get a problem resolved, just a link to an article, and the SLT is starting to lose patience. Does anyone have an actual named contact or email address of a human at Arbor? We weren't given a project manager for the migration, and are generally being ignored now by the sales team who see their work as complete. If I get one more reply from their useless support bot....... I'm guessing they have just oversold themselves and simply don't have the resources to cope with the influx of schools migrating ahead of ESS contract renewals, but I'd much rather they had been honest and delayed our go live than promise the earth and give us nothing but a migraine.

Hi all We are just about done with Parentpay as their support is non-existent these days, and are looking for an alternative as we also need to change our cashless catering system (currently Cypad - part of Parentpay - utterly dreadful). Any recommendations as we are also looking to dump Sims, with Arbor being the front runner. Ideally we want one system which will handle parents and staff cash for lunches, school trips etc, but also for comms as we currently have split systems for sending emails or texts and one that will integrate with Arbor. Any recommendations gratefully received.

Thanks. After 3 weeks of going back and forth what has come to light is despite it being "impossible" to allocate an existing Staff ID against a new user, this appears to have happened to 3 staff members. Therefore trying to reinstate them by following the standard procedure fails. Because ESS Support kept saying it was impossible to allocate an existing Staff ID to anyone other than the same staff member we didn't think of going through and double checking. They haven't been able to explain how the impossible occurred, but we have now been able to create the staff again with new IDs and then move the balances across.

Hi All I'm hoping someone may have had experience of how to do something which I think should be simple, but which seems anything but when taking to Parentpay support. Somehow during routine admin, 3 staff members were marked as having left in MIS Sync. Two of which still have balances on their account. All we want to do is reinstate them. So far Parentpay support have told us: 1. We cannot use MIS-Sync to update staff - we need to use an Excel Spreadsheet and just give the staff the same ID to re-enable their account. 2. Not to give staff the same ID as that won't work, but give them a new ID. 3. Just add the staff back in with MIS-Sync. 4. Create a spreadsheet of all staff, and upload, and from then on only ever use the spreadsheet and not use the MISSync app to manage staff. None of the above works. Worse still, we now cannot add any new staff, it just fails. Support say we need to create a spreadsheet of all staff, delete all existing staff, then re-upload and only ever use the spreadsheet going forwards. They completely ignore the fact that the deleted staff have balances, or give us a way of re-enabling the staff. Seems every person we speak to says there is only one way to fix it, and the next person we speak to claims the way we were told to do it would never work anyway and try another way, and then we just go in circles. Has anyone ever managed to successfully change a left member of staff to active? Is it true that we should have been using a spreadsheet to manage staff and not use MIS Sync? This has been going on for 3 weeks now - both by phone and email, and as we now have several conflicting responses I thought I'd reach out to the wider world for help!

Thanks both. The reports were written in Word, saved as PDF. I've worked out we can send them in Messaging in Sims Parent as an attachment but its a manual process. It does at least meet the needs for now. Next year Teachers will be briefed on how to create the reports the correct way!

Hi Long story short - we lost our I.T manager a few months back and are now struggling with Sims Parent and end of year reports which he used to take care of. Previously end of year reports were shared to parents via Sims Parent. However we now have 700 PDF documents waiting to be shared to parents, and from what I can see in the minimal documentation sent by ESS is that the reports have to be created within Sims and then shared, i.e we can't upload pre-written reports in PDF format for sharing. Is this the case? Has anyone managed to share documents by uploading to Sims or do the reports have to be created from Marksheets and then shared? Sorry for the wide scope of the question - previous schools I've worked in still use printed reports. I've a week to get a solution in place for electronically distributing the reports which is secure and compliant, and if we can't do it by Sims I'm a bit stuck. Thanks for any guidance in advance.

Just been alerted to 2 DfE laptops at one of our schools getting popups alerting of virus activity and to call a UK mobile number to speak to Microsoft. One of the laptops was in use by a teacher who called the number and was told it would cost £5 to remove the virus and directed to gsupport.me to give remote access. Thankfully they then twigged it was a hoax and hung up. However because they were aware of media reports that some of these laptops had been infected, they were confused enough to engage. The laptop will be returned for investigation - these were definitely not pre-configured devices. Nothing was detected in setup. Coincidence or is this what the Trojan does? I'm more worried that parents may be inclined to call and pay for removal if they get this popup as they will have signed agreements to maintain the laptops whilst in their care. The number terminates in India despite having a UK mobile format. All our schools will be sending advisory emails to all recipients in the morning.