malbox

I'm VERY late to this, but I have some script that runs - not on the exchange server but via VBA (Excel + Outlook). Doesn't do delays (easy enough to write in), but does do individual e-mails with mail merge into the e-mail and personal attachments (if you have/need them). Happy to share

In the hope that replying directly will prompt - we're also experiencing the "staff receiving to work and personal e-mail addresses" issue. I have created an idea to correct here: https://ideas.bromcomcloud.com/ideas/BRCM-I-2727 Couple of other things: When using multiple tabs (which is standard with Bromcom) - you don't always get the "Close" cross in all tabs - at least, certainly not in chrome. It seems to always take you to the "log" of alerts when clicking to close. What would be REALLY helpful is if the log of alerts was viewable as a standalone page that refreshed regularly (every minute?) rather than a popover - this would make it far more useful for roaming call outs - they could carry round a tablet with that page open and have them come in (the slight delay would likely not be an issue) and mean they wouldn't need to deal with the popups on the right. They could just monitor for them on that page - and it would mean not having to have a fake staff member set up to be logged in (it is not always the same person roaming). (And, if I'm dreaming, the option to either put a comment or "Dealt with" check next to an alert)

On our site - yes. And force closes don't always work, needing someone (usually me) to go in, delete parent account, and send a new invite. Which then can sometimes not let parent sign back up anyway (saying they still have an account - I think that's a timing issue - going "too fast" for Sims).

We're also moving - it's not the worst migration experience I've had, but it's also not near the best. My issues are with: us: I'm doing all the lifting at our end, trying to get staff to understand all that's involved and that I need time and decisions is a struggle. our deployment manager and getting answers to questions (I wonder if we have the same one - I had to forward on an e-mail several times over 2 weeks to get a reply - now have been assigned a Customer Success Manager) training: trainers are trying to demonstrate stuff with training databases that aren't complete enough (we'll do this report on attendance.... they build the report.... there's no attendance data in the system for the last 2 years) the pace of shared webinars is frustratingly slow (I get why, they're shared webinars, but still very frustrating when I have all the things to do and the first 10 to 15 minutes is "here's the online help, here's the agenda for today"). in some cases it seems they're just following a script, without always seeming to have a strong knowledge of the area [*]"Access" - it would be so helpful to have access to the forums/help, even if a subset, while we're making decisions about setup and the best way to use the system - the documentation just doesn't give you that. I will say that the one piece of 1 to 1 training on assessment that we've had so far (2 more this week, than have the full house) was fantastic. Trainer appeared to know area inside out, allowed us to move at a the faster pace we wanted, answered all our questions, give some good helpful advice - and took less of our time than the less involved Personnel/HR training. It reminded me of the guy who sat on with the salesman when we looked at the more involved parts of the system (also very good). Re: attendance - we had that too with a previous MIS, and really is just a timing issue. For the shift to Bromcom we're fine (I send the data off the last day of term, Our go live date is half way into the Easter break so I can set up and ready for use during the second week). My suggestion would be: export your attendance marks into something that mirrors the bromcom layout, day by day - stick a formula on to flag those with any mark that isn't a present mark, filter to those (by YG if you want). Bulk assign present codes to all (without saving). Run through the list on the sheet and amend those on Bromcom to the right code. Save. You should be able to do a day in sub half an hour as a guess (I know that's still not ideal with everything else going on - but with 2 screens it's very doable. I have to do a logging task every term (student's give us their own Attitude to learning that gets reported - logged on paper sheets) - and as long as you get the "setup" right - it can go surprisingly quickly. Happy to share other ideas/thoughts/help if you'd like - feel free to drop me a message - maybe we can keep each others blood pressures down!

I never liked the "embed your macro as the report document" solution, always seemed to throw up quirks and always limited to data from that one report - so just used to set up a workbook outside SIMS with commandreporter pulling the reports out, and then processing, at the start of the script (when reports needed truly live data - eg the way we manage detentions means I have a sheet that pulls three reports out that way that applies various rules before producing the lists, e-mails home + to staff, etc). How/if commandreporter works with hosted, however - not a clue (self-hosted here). If not PowerBI but considering - is worth trying Excel and powerquery (using overnight data dumps) - powerquery should give you a start in learning how to get the data as you'll want it for PowerBI, as well as giving a decent solution.

If it helps - how we deal with similar things here is set up simple reports to pull out the various tables we want. Those get run by a scheduled script (using commandreporter) - and then we use either Power Query + Excel or Power BI to produce the summaries (depending on where they're going to / who's using). Downside is it's always out of date info (reports run overnight), but it's worked for us (and will for the next 2 and a bit weeks til we're Bromcom)

Hi again Not sure if you'll have received a notification, but I dropped you a (lengthy) DM last week Mal

I may be wrong (as far as I'm aware - I do check where you've mentioned - we've never had one made available to us - we've always had to chase primary schools for a CTF) but I believe your LA are the people responsible for producing and distributing - it may be they just haven't got round to it yet (assuming they do them)

Could you ask your HR to mock up how they'd like the report to look (using Joe Bloggs/other mock data) and let me have a copy (either post here or let me know and I can send an e-mail address by PM) - am happy to sort it out and then explain how it works

Brill. One thing I've just thought of worth noting - if you want to show all exclusions in the date/dataset range - you need to make sure you're showing all students, not just the current (which is the SIMS default). Otherwise any leavers (for whatever reason, including PX) and their exclusions won't show. (You then get into an interesting situation with student yeargroups (for leavers) and more generally student characteristics (SEN etc) at time of exclusion - but that's a further topic!)

Something I do for a lot of reports in SIMs is pull the basic data out from a report (or multiple reports) using the command line reporter, process it in a fashion sims just doesn't allow, and then present the data in the various ways wanted. This is generally all done within excel - staff just have to click a button. May be overkill in this case, but if ever the underlying code may help people please shout as happy to share (we do this for various things from staff absence overview, to the detentions process, and more). Knowledge of VBA would help, but can explain what it's doing. Early on in our sims life we did try using VBA with the custom excel templates all within SIMs - but it's far more limited and found it caused more problems than it sorted.

Where are you putting the date range/dataset as a filter - if it's against the student (assuming that's the focus of the report) then it's acting as it should. If it's against the exclusion "subreport/subtable", it's not. If your filter is against the exclusions rather than students I'm happy to take a look/try it on our dataset here.

Not sure about Bromcom, but Arbor were suggesting (back in November/start of December) that we could onboard earlier and go live for the 2nd half Spring Term. Personally - if starting now (or even if starting in a few weeks) I'd be very wary about trying to do it by then - especially as you'll be held up by sorting P/O, payment etc to get started. We (particularly I) felt various downsides to doing before Summer Term even starting a bit sooner earlier - from other work that needs my attention to other tasks for staff such as examination entries, end of term reports/data collection fairly soon on a new system (involving all the setup to be ready), a single week of "downtime" to get everything set up as wanted, no TE Day at the start to give time to cover the more basic teacher training (specific roles will be getting the Bromcom training, but we'll set up and then "train" teaching staff ourself so we're all (hopefully) working in the same way and know what the system is doing). Going live at the start of the Summer Term means we run SIMS unsupported for what I think is 5/6 teaching days - and we're quite comfortable with that. We then close down the server at the end of term, send our data off again (having cleaned it up a bit after initial transfer and look at it on a test site), and teachers come back to a new system with a TE Day.

For whoever is keeping count on leavers - you can add a single secondary academy switching to Bromcom. We started the review in the Summer term before any of the ESS contract changes - was disrupted somewhat by Covid issues. After initial first view of Arbor the deputy said we'd be mad not to change from SIMS. Gave staff from all areas a chance to view areas of systems relevant to them and give input - which I hope will get better engagement for the switch, as all are positive about it. Felt Arbor and Bromcom were the stand out systems, but Bromcom worked more as we wanted in certain key areas. Both offered good savings on SIMS (when looking at 3rd party systems/server costs etc). Previously we've been SIMS for nearly 7 years (a "gift" to me when a new head started - was an improvement at the time) with Facility Administration before that. Switchover will be for the start of the Summer Term, also in process of review of our Catering system (currently Cunninghams), staff/visitor sign-in system (currently CBSecurePass - nobody is fond of it) and Library system (currently Reading Cloud) (I'm not sure if this is my first post or not - but I've lurked for an awful long time - hello and thank you to all I've picked up information from without acknowledging previously - apologies for not saying hello sooner)