TheCookieMonster

I look forward to your campaign to ban comment banks from school reports too. 😅 99% of people here are intolerant, middle aged blokes. So you're in good company. 😁

I expect they got a lot of complaints so use of donotreply and copypasta is pretty standard. You can't expect them to have a fully personalised dialogue with every single person who had an issue when the cause of it was the same and the impact broadly similar. I'd rather they spent the time / effort / money making things better than giving 1000s of individualised apologies. Just glad that the return from Easter was all OK. I noticed they put a minor performance incident up on Monday, but I don't know of anyone that was affected and all seems clear today. I gather some schools are still off though so may be speaking too soon!

Relieved to see much better performance this morning and fingers crossed for next week.

Lol, but how do you really feel? 😅 If you read the RCAs from previously (which Bromcom have got good at publishing and being transparent) they do take ownership of issues and a bit part of their comms at the moment is "technical debt". Not someone else's - Bromcom's technical debt. So no, it's not "always the case" that they blame others. They're aware of their weakness and are far less shy about it these days. It's good to see. Don't get me wrong though, it's still their failure if it's another supplier to them. They own the relationship so "it's all Microsoft's fault" doesn't wash.

I'm fairly sure that, if it was capacity, they'd solve it really easily and really quickly. Having heard what the CTO has to say on it and having read previous RCAs, Bromcom's challenge is similar to what SIMS went through (and arguably still is) - old and badly written / unfuture-proof code and coding practices. SIMS suffered more because they delayed doing anything about it for too long. At least Bromcom seems to be doing something about this early. You can throw hardware at software issues - but it only takes you so far.

Wow not seen this thread resurface for several months.

Definitely worth asking this on community.bromcom.com. A lot of MATs frequent it and may be able to offer some guidance. One chooses an integrated system like Bromcom because it's integrated, the costs are lower and its easier to control. I don't think you'll find anyone arguing that the use of 3rd parties (not just in safeguarding) doesn't offer wider scope, functionality, granularity etc.. But who wants several separate sets of training, SLAs, supplier contracts, relationships etc. etc. etc. anyway? Comes down to what your goals, priorities and what you will compromise on.

If they did I would not expect a clumsy 'lift and shift' of the existing software into a Cloud environment but rather a re-write into the Cloud which would mean long development cycles to achieve the previously enjoyed functionality and even then, it will probably still change how it works. If you're looking to go into the cloud as a priority with timetabling, other options are already available in this space as others have said above.

Be interested to hear more about thoughts on this and its features from real users.

Arbor's status page is saying it's down, or at least performance is an issue at the moment. Looks like it's been since last week.

The RCA is quite solid and it is interim. Expect we will get more detail later along with more remedial action. Seen some slowness of MCAS has been reported on the status page this morning, but I'm not seeing any of that. Good to see them highlighting stuff to warn anyway. Probably quite on edge!

Bromcom's been Cloud-based for quite a long time. Far from "brand new". VMs with SQL Server per tenant is a bit more lift-and-shift though. It's not really SaaS architecture (e.g. kubernetes + serverless everything). It's more like a datacentre in the cloud but is that inherently bad? 🤷‍♂️ you can put bad, inefficient code in a "true SaaS" system too.

Oh go on then.. what did it say?

I don't know about others but it seems to be looking much better.

Moving schools to act like businesses with academisation has pushed the responsibility of good procurement (including vetting and supplier management) over to them from a local authority. An academy gets more money, but you get more responsibility for making good choices and holding vendors to account with it. We can't have it both ways. Same goes for paper backup methods - that's up to the schools to have. Same if you have a power cut or lose internet for the day.