JamieJ

I well and truly threw my toys out of the pram Tuesday afternoon and told them I wanted an early termination and refund for the service. I've now had my ticket escalated to their "Resolutions Team". This is the response I had later that evening from said team:

Think I'm going to book a demo too of schoolbooking, getting thoroughly fed up of RBS now. TES's "solution" to SAML SSO issues is to change our network configuration so that all browsers clear cookies upon closing. Sure, that'll fix the tickets about logging into room booking, only to replace them with tickets from staff asking why they have to log into websites several times every day

We've had similar issues with SAML based authentication from early December onwards. I've been trying all sorts - switched over from ADFS to Azure (was the perfect excuse to move away from old on-prem services). I've been badgering them constantly and finally this morning had the following response through:

I think I've finally achieved the holy grail of installing Python + Thonny + additional packages in a single hit using your script as the basis. The reason it needs the second run of the script is that the install updates the PATH variable to point to the python and pip binaries. The cmd prompt instance that is running the installer batch doesn't get this updated version of the path variable while it's still running, removing the goto: end after the installation of Python and adding the following code will read the updated path variables from the registry and re-set them in the current instance just before it runs pip so it now knows where to look for it. REM Get system path from registry for /f "tokens=3*" %%A in ('reg query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment" /v Path') do set syspath=%%A %%B REM Get user path from registry for /f "tokens=3*" %%A in ('reg query "HKCU\Environment" /v Path') do set userpath=%%A %%B REM Set updated pathset PATH=%userpath%;%syspath%

We've recently installed and used Alertus https://www.alertus.com/. They also do an initiative aimed at schools that make it free for their basic functionality which covers on-screen alerts on desktop PCs - https://www.alertus.com/safe-in-seconds-apply - Whilst the site is very much US based the scheme also covers UK schools.

Funnily enough I did start looking at the APIs to see whether there was anything I could cobble together quickly from it. The batch API looks like it will let me pull data out en-masse but in a somewhat clunky fashion, and the REST API looks like it's potentially additional cost! As I've got the luxury of direct database access, I'm probably going to just grab data directly from the tables and either create something in PowerShell to do the grunt work, or possibly a go down the route of creating a web-app of some description so I / other teams have more visibility and control over what has been / is sent. Interestingly, the school took the decision to move away from the parent portal in favour of using My School Portal. Inevitably we gained some additional functionality but also lost a fair bit too. We've got all the email templates set up, but as with any process, remembering to do something is always the weakest link! Having previously worked at a college where we extensively used data based triggers in the MIS system to initiate workflows or generate SMS or Emails, I can't help but desperately miss not having similar functionality in iSAMS. I guess I've just been spoilt!

Hi all, looking to see whether anyone has found a solution (or even developed one in house) for the automatic generation and sending of emails from iSAMS based on a workflow / data based trigger. I've looked at the list of CRM systems that integrate with it, and unless I've overlooked it, they all are based on incoming leads (i.e. applications) and the integration pushes data into iSAMS at the point of enrolment. What I'm after is something that works with the data in iSAMS and then generates emails without manual intervention (and wishful thinking would be to log it against the communication history of a student too!) The sort of thing I'm looking to automate would include: Periodic confirmation of parental contact data held in iSAMS - people can quite frequently change mobile phone or email addresses, especially given that students can potentially be at the school for 18 years if they stay all the way through. Welcome emails to new parents containing information about the IT systems the school uses and how to create or activate their accounts - these are fine to send manually at the start of year, but its easy to forget to send them to students who join partway through the year. Exam reminder emails We currently self-host and use SQL Standard, so don't have the luxury of Data-Driven Subscriptions in SSRS to achieve this; its hard to justify the difference in cost to upgrade to SLT when its free to just have someone click a button or two once a week. I'm also aware that potentially this could be done on the SQL server itself through scheduled tasks, but its not very user friendly and ideally I'd like something that can be administered by more than just myself.