ASA-Simon

Framework now accepts bank transfers to a UK account. Not had the need to order any more laptops for Teachers but will be a good one to test out next time.

Some of our students are having the following error when signing in on our Chromebooks: "Google couldn't verfiy that this account belongs to you. Try again later or go to https://g.co/recover for help." We are using OIDC to login with SSO with Microsoft accounts. I have tried turning off the login challenge for 10 minutes but this doesn't fix it. Anyone else run into this issue?

I did attempt to buy one of their laptops for one of our staff just to test it out. Had to give up in the end and revert back to our usual Dell. They don’t have a UK bank account to accept payments. It has to go to a bank account in the Netherlands. This threw our finance team as they don’t usually make payments to international accounts. They also don’t do Net payments terms. Our finance team are also not keen on pro forma invoices. The amount was too big for credit cards which are normally hammered over the summer break for various things. Will check again in the future.

Trouble with SIMS is it’s never just another year. It’s another 3 years you have to sign up for. Glad we are away from them now.

It looks like the embargo for the Framework 12 is today. iFixit have a teardown video:

Curious to know if anyone is using the Framework laptops? (https://frame.work/gb/en) They do come in more expensive than the normal amount we would spend on a teacher laptop. I do wonder if the higher cost is offset by the improved repairability and being able to upgrade it over time. I would say overall teacher laptops are treated far better than student laptops. The Framework 12 does look interesting for student use. My only reservation is the expansion cards. I can see them being removed and thrown all over the place. It would be great to have something so easily repairable. I've had such a mixed experience with different brands of laptops. We can't get replacement keyboards for some Chromebooks anymore, so they end up being e-waste if they get picked apart.

What SMTP server are you using to send the emails out from Bromcom? Office 365 does place limits on this. It is recommended to use Bromcom's own SMTP servers. This does come at a cost though.

First day going live with Bromcom and virgin are having issues with accessing Azure hosted services. Bromcom, Onedrive and Zoho helpdesk are crawling along at the moment. Worst possible timing.

That sounds workable. Thanks for helping to clear that up for me.

Hi everyone. We are days away from our switch over to Bromcom. Something that has come up is when Teachers send messages out through Bromcom. We are being told by Bromcom that all replies from parents come back to a generical email address rather than the teacher that sent out the message. For those that use Bromcom, is this the correct way it behaves?

Would it be worth considering third party support such as https://www.turniton.co.uk/ ? I think Bromcom do offer a discount if you are using third party support services.

I used the template specification provided by Everything ICT and refined it by doing interviews with heads of departments, admin staff etc. I couldn't recommend them more for getting through the process.

We've already done the update to the Autumn release but no change with this issue. I have got a call tomorrow with Satchel to hopefully move over to Wonde.

Running into the same problem with Xporter at the moment. It's been down for 20+ days and support haven't been able to get it going again. I know it's not a filtering issue as we have our SIMS server as an IP exclusion on Smoothwall.

Latest bringmoredata blog post is out: https://bringmoredata.blogspot.com/2024/12/mis-market-moves-winter-2024-change-is.html

Yes doesn't tally up with the figures in the news: https://www.whichmis.com/mis-market-churn-autumn-2024-schools-continue-to-change-their-providers/

https://mis-trends.info/mis-comparisons/ is a good stats dashboard. It's odd to see that SIMS is up by 529 for Autumn 2024.

Hi everyone We will be moving from SIMS to Bromcom late this year or early next. Does anyone know of a payroll provider that works nicely with Bromcom? We currently use Access Finance and HR. It results in a lot of duplicate data entry between SIMS and Access. It would be great to have something that removes this. We did ask Bromcom but their finance products don't handle the payroll part. Any recommendations?

Ultimately it was the tender process that helped choose between the two. It was incredibly close but the general feeling was that Bromcom offered a slightly more polished and friendly GUI. There was less clicking through things needed. Also Bromcom felt like a mature product whereas there was still the odd feature being developed for a future release with Compass. Despite that I wouldn't be put off considering them. They were coming in as a cheaper option compared to the likes of Bromcom and Arbor. We did invite Arbor to participate but they declined. It was quite off-putting. I don't think they wanted to put in the work to go through a tender for just one school. Also there was criticism that they specification template that Everything ICT use is too close to the SIMS feature set, something I would disagree with. I didn't really expect such a strange attitude from the leading company behind SIMS. I had the same response from IRIS Ed:gen as well. Satchel One was also planned to be a 3rd product but they didn't submit anything on time. Sad as I would have liked to have seen how they compare. I am a big fan of their UI design. I'm just happy that we are finally moving away from SIMS. Aiming to be moved over by the start of 2025. I'm hoping the response from staff will be positive.

Having gone through a tender recently for an MIS to replace SIMS, I had a very positive impression of Compass. While the school ultimately didn't go for Compass I would say they are worthy of consideration. Their feature set covered areas that Bromcom/Arbor doesn't such as their own catering pos and visitor sign-in/sign-out like inventry. I used Everything ICT for the tender process and would definitely recommend them.

I'm surprised so many mentions of RISO. The quotes we had last time we went through renewal were crazy. The cost of one machine was the same price as kitting out the whole school with 5 x copiers from Sharp. Cost per page was great but you would need to be printing huge amounts to make up for the big increase in rental. No big complaints about Sharp. They have been fairly reliable.

I've got Everything ICT that will be running a tender for us. I've got a spec and invitation to tender documents ready to go.

I'm just in the process of getting the head to agree to start a tender for moving MIS. The last hurdle is getting feedback from schools on how they found their migration process went. I'd be really grateful if anyone could help respond to these questions. Ideally with name of school, feel free to DM me if you don't want to share it on here. My questions are as follows: Overall how smoothly did you find the move to your new MIS? How long did it take to complete the move to your new MIS? How did you train your staff in preparation for changing MIS? How did you spread out training for staff? Was training completed during inset/CPD days or did staff complete it in their own time? How confident were your staff in using the new MIS after the go live date? Is there anything you would do differently if you had to go through the process again? Are there any features you feel are missing in your new MIS compared to your previous one? Has moving to a cloud based MIS removed the need to provide remote access to staff?

Not sure yet. It will probably be between Arbor, Bromcom and Compass. Still very early in the process.

I'm currently going through the tender process for moving away from SIMS to a new MIS. One of the questions that has come up is how much CPD time would be needed to train up staff to use the new MIS. I expect certain key staff would have quite a fair bit more training to get through than a teacher. I would be interest to hear from anyone who has gone through the move, for the training that was delivered to all staff, how much time did you need to dedicate to this?