Dr_Zeux

Figures crossed on all of this, but in the meantime, we (their customers) continue to suffer and waste time submitting 'development ideas' as suggested by the helpdesk

With all due respect Darren, there isn't much negativity about what customers really think and struggling with on the Community. If you look on here, and/or FB groups, you get a much wider picture of the complaints and the real struggles that schools face related to Bromcom outages/performance issues... I would genuinely like to give you feedback around the community, as I have done with my previous CSM, some of which was fed back (apparently) but our school no longer has a CSM. One idea would definitely be around improving the 'development ideas', that seem to be completely ignored, no matter how good the idea is or how many votes it has...

My experience so far has been very negative, we've been using Bromcom for 1 and half years and support has been awful and the system itself has quite a few bugs/glitches...

I'm not entirely surprised the comment was removed - they don't want any bad publicity/comments of what schools think, it's not really a forum - more of a 'controlled' bulletin board. They've had 3 out of 4 weeks since the start of term, with outages/issues and apparently it was supposed to start improving - as informed by Alastair McKenzie in his email of 20th December! We're also beginning think the same thing about their services...

Yes, it's very common - and they don't always alert you! Also, the status page is a complete waste of time - it's inaccurate, and seemingly wanting to promote that it's uptime is mostly around 99.9%! You can't actually find the info. necessary for outages on their status page, so you end up phoning the helpdesk!

We have migrated away from Sims and to Bromcom - have regretted it ever since! Software has so many bugs...

Yes, there were problems this morning and the reporting servers were down. But as previously advised, apparently the service status will not report this, as it it not a global problem - my point around this, is that often we're advised by Bromcom to check the status page - what's the point, if this isn't updated to reflect outages, albeit that it doesn't impact everyone...

I've also informed Customercare about this issue countless times over the last few months, and lack of informing customers when their system is slow, non-responsive, or when they take it offline completely, but so far no improvement... If I was lucky enough to get a response to one of these emails, usually the advice is to check the status page - which is clearly useless, as it's giving the wrong information today, but I suspect other days as well...

Totally agree - today for example there are more issues/outages. No updates on status page, and helpdesk have confirmed many schools have reported problems with Bromcom being slow and non-responsive as has affected our school this morning! Status page says 'No incidents' - whilst I appreciate you may not put an update unless affecting 100% of schools, this is also giving the wrong/false information if it affects say 10% of their schools, as it did for my school today! Customer care keep saying for us to check this page when Bromcom is down, so how can I trust this status page, if it's giving false info? Also, as a result, I would suggest their uptime stats are completely false!

We're having the same issues - but i'm hoping these will calm down soon. We are typically waiting 1hr on phone to get through to support every day to log issues. Some issues aren't even picked up, and have to keep chasing. With our Virtual school, the system simply doesn't do what it was sold to us as and Sims actually did these things previously (simple things like copy attendance from school to school, seeing Year groups for guest students, print a 2-week timetable on one page from student record)

They've replied to my follow up email today, so these settings must be correct. In addition, if emailing from a school with a '.sch.uk' email address at the end, and subsequently being caught in a spam filter, I would argue the spam filtering is not very effective!

We use Office 365, so i assume these protocols are available for tweaking by our IT team, but that they're probably at a 'default' type setting currently, which should allow emails from Arbor. Interesting though, that we have received marketing emails from james@... and daniel@.... to our info@ email address, so i know the emails from Arbor get through to our domain! I don't dispute that Arbor are probably very good at what they do as a MIS supplier, and i've heard the same, which is why we wanted them to come in for a demo, but customer service and responding to potential customers hasn't been a good experience for us...

Sure, so i called your customer service line on 16 Sept and was informed to email hello@arbor.... and i did so on 16 Sept 2021 @ 13:54. Then, on 26 November, as a response to James's email to our info@ email address (as a marketing type email), i responded to say that we still hadn't had a response from the initial enquiry email to hello@... and then i sent him another email forwarding the initial email - these emails were sent at 11:23 & 11:24 to james@... To be honest, i was slightly more disturbed that the Co-founder & CEO didn't respond, rather than the initial email to hello@! To date, i haven't heard anything back to any of these emails. Can't imagine that's helped your stats you quoted above. Hope this helps to improve your service.

Hi James Having made an initial phone enquiry with Arbor, I was informed to send a follow up email to hello@.... I sent multiple emails to your company, including to yourself, to get your company to demo to our consortium (made up of 4 schools). I heard nothing back to these emails and as such, have decided to go with Bromcom. It's a shame, as i've heard very good things about Arbor, but if you can't respond to simple emails, it doesn't leave me feeling very convinced about your organisation providing support for schools should we switch to Arbor. So, unfortunately, as a result, you lost 4 secondary schools' business... Hope your customer service improves going forwards!

Thanks for info. Supportman!

That's really good to hear, but what they class as errors and what you class as errors, might not be the same thing. Ie. Have you got the 'linked documents' into Bromcom somewhere? Are you templates for Assessment there? Are the reports all imported, etc.?

We are likely to go down this road, but they haven't said that to us - we're only being charged for the Finance Suite... which is about £2400 p/a i believe...

The Competition and Markets Authority, which is a sub division of DfE are looking into this I believe...

We're likely to do our Migration over the summer with Bromcom. We will no doubt invoke the 6 month break clause before 31st Aug.

Yes, via email to [email protected]

Thanks Supportman. Any issues with any historical data from Sims during data migration, ie. reports, or assessment templates?

Thanks Andrew, i'll take a look - were they recent?

Would it be possible to have a quick chat about about this sometime? Thank you, Darron

Hi all I wonder if anyone has experience of migrating to Arbor or Bromcom, that is either part of a consortium or MAT? We are in this position at the moment and considering these 2 MIS systems, pros/cons and day-to-day use of. Please message if anyone has been through this. Many thanks in advance. Regards, Darron

Hi David Can i ask what MIS you are planning to move to? We are looking into this at the moment for our consortium. Many thanks, Darron