TheCookieMonster

Classcharts- YES: Attendance, Behaviour, seating plans, and comms (MCAS) - Bromcom replaces all of these. Can from day-dot as well. EdulinkONe - YES: Bromcom covers this fully with MCAS and can do from day-dot. MyConcern YES (eventually): Bromcom has a safeguarding module which does it all, but requires a bit more set up an familiarity. NovaT - YES (eventually)Bromcom'swTimetable is very good, but takes training and getting used to. This is one to phase in eventually. FMS - YES (I think)Bromcom Finance. Not got this, but from what I've seen, it's fully integrated. Just have to be careful around migration and setup as you should for financial data in general. Inventry - NO (but)Can be integrated. Bromcom doesn't replace the need for a physical visitor management system. My advice would be to talk to the sales teams where possible to get an overview of what most customers do and when they do it. A lot of the people working at Bromcom (the ones I dealt with) were all ex school and MAT people so know their stuff. Also maybe get onto community.bromcom.com to ask about people's experiences there. Best of luck!

Went with Bromcom's just for ease of use. Pricing is reasonable. Would suggest asking the Bromcom Community this one to see what others are doing - may be more responses than on here, and more tailored to your situation.

Just make sure the school understand the risks of taking this on internally. You're setting all this up and then, say, you leave for whatever reason. Where does that leave them?

For sure it's unpalatable, but that doesn't make it always wrong. We're in a place where schools are getting treated like businesses to "make education better" while extracting money from the public purse for higher salaries for operators. This approach naturally has benefits and it has its drawbacks. Operating with litigious companies is the latter, as is the scrutiny over eye-watering 6-figure salaries for the big players like United, Harris etc.. Questions for people highly critical though: - how bad does something need to be before you'd believe legal action was credible i.e. what is your red line? - Or is it just NEVER ok? - Are you happy for schools/MATs/LAs to sue providers? What should a company like Bromcom do instead? There doesn't seem to be much else. They tried to go through the CMA with the SIMS migration fiasco and the CMA just dropped it because they're too busy. There's clearly a lack of proper guidance and time/money/attention for mediation to control these things properly. Just from a financial perspective too, and from the same source.. median salary in MATs now is 144k. There's 1200 MATs. That's an annual salary bill of £173 million. If we're worried about losing money from the education sector, there are bigger fish.

Word of warning, got to be careful about using AI to process data outside of MIS systems. Something like ChatGPT will process data outside of the UK which could put you in breach of UK data protection laws. Bromcom's AI carries warnings about using it for personal data where it's using AI outside of the norm, but they have one that works from within the MIS which is quite good. If you have O365, Microsoft Co-pilot operates within your tenancy so keeps data etc nice and safe. I think AI within an MIS is the way forward, as the supplier takes on many of the relative costs, risks etc.

I've found the helpdesk guide here to be very comprehensive regarding service levels - https://docs.bromcom.com/knowledge-base/bromcom-support-desk-guide/ If it's 'low' then there's normally a good reason for that i.e. it's not affecting anything statutory or you have a workaround? Difficult to say without know the case details, but the response times from most support orgs for a low priority issue is usually pretty long. Arbor doesn't even have an SLA target for their 'low' priority cases! There's also an escalation process you can follow here - https://docs.bromcom.com/knowledge-base/bromcom-support-desk-guide/#how-to-escalate-support-cases but it's basically to email the customer care team. I've had dealings with them in the past and found them quite supportive and responsive.

[adjusts anorak] Software is designed to work in a particular way, or it isn't. If it's meant to do ABC, but does ABZ - that's a defect/bug for the software provider to fix. If it's meant to do ABC, and does ABC, but you want it to do DE and F - that's a request to change how the software works. Some people might not want it to do DE and F, so changing it to what you want would cause them to raise another request to change it back. You don't get this argument with bug/defect fixing because the solution is normally staring you in the face and there's a software design to fall back on. This is why most good MIS providers have change request portals (like ideas or roadmaps etc.) with comment sections, so people can vote for what they like and argue against things they don't want. They do listen - I know Bromcom recently re-jogged it's 2025 roadmap according to customer preference. This seems more like a grey area in the MIS though that is worthy of discussion. I would suggest raising the Idea and then raising it on Bromcom's own community to get some weight behind it.

I have to agree with Supportman. We provision the use of IPADS in school so the teacher app can be used and this has been a real help. Since taking on Bromcom the support has always been there when needed as well as the Community which is something Bromcom have stolen a march in the market on as we resolve so many queries on the community without needing to call the support team. It's ultimately a zero line support and saves so much time. Some of our staff have been attending the daily drop-in sessions which they've gained so much from. Parents Evening time soon so we will see how it goes as we have moved on from our 3rd party provider to do it solely via Bromcom and the app. The issues at the start of term were frustrating to say the least, but touch wood everything seems fine since.

Great Idea!! I'll point my staff towards these from tomorrow morning rather than calling support.

We use Bromcom and haven't looked back since to be honest. No software is perfect anyone that says otherwise is lying in my opinion, but the man hours saved when it comes to reporting is huge within the admin team.

We moved to Bromcom and haven't looked back - In all honesty it was a choice of Bromcom or Arbor which was won by Bromcom as it catered for our needs better. Both are miles clear of the rest.

There's a host of Youtube, Twitch and other streaming millionaires, not to mention Minecraft server owners who would disagree that it (or any other game) is just a pleasurable pastime. Maybe a better comparison would be SIMS who still take months and years to fix some of the most annoying (albeit not world-ending) bugs with their software and haven't actually enhanced anything for as long as I can remember.

Ahh so sounds like it's infra related rather than software. The status page has also been pushed up to 'Major'.

Hopefully won't last. First time it's been bad in ages though and in general system performance has been quite good for us lately. Stuff like this is a reminder that we should all have backup processes in place - paper registers etc. to meet statutory obligations. Bromcom aside, never know when the internet might just pack up. Should always have a plan. Teacher app also appears to still work btw, so must use a different service.

We use Bromcom which links to our till system with parents paying via the app. I think our bundle we purchased was the One Stop Shop which has enabled us to slowly move away from some 3rd party subscriptions.

1 - No problems here we generally use the self service to add new users and haven't made any complaints. We also raise tickets online when required. 2- Helpdesk have been great and has clearly grown in the last year to cater for the demand of new customers. 3 - Much better again over the last year we also receive a weekly digest from the community which also includes the top 5 posts from the previous week and any important information that needs to be shared. (This is really useful) Status page also gets updated. You can never receive too much communication in my opinion however. 4- As mentioned above these are released on Friday evenings. Sometimes it doesn't get released fully as appreciate things need to pass a testing process. 5- We raise Ideas and share them on the community to gain traction and votes from other customers.

Perfect all the best with it

My advice is get a list of your questions and non negotiables and get Bromcom and Arbor in front of you all and pick the best one for you from that.

Well done to Bromcom and Arbor they deserve all the success coming their way currently.

Huge win for Bromcom

From the outside In I think Bromcom need congratulating for the NI contract and I am sure provisions are being put in place their end to ensure it doesn't hurt existing customers. The growth of both Arbor and Bromcom in the MIS market needs commending as both are clearly doing a lot right.

Let us know if you get sorted

Keep pushing them for a migration manager would be my advise if all else fails call the support line. Very poor service for a new customer though i must admit.

Sounds odd to me especially at a stressful time moving MIS. Do you have direct contact details for the migration team or is the hello@ the only contact details you've been provided? Migrations cannot be a faceless process, every school is unique and must be able to ask the relevant questions throughout the process. Hope you get it sorted.

It's not generally best practice (at least not in ITIL / ISO20000) to count any incident or service degradation towards up/down time. If they did, the service would show as never 'up' because there are always issues/incidents to varying degrees. That would indeed make the page useless. So too would it be if they split every function of Bromcom down into its component parts and tried to report on their specific uptime.. the page itself I expect would end up with some serious performance issues given it'd need to be a mile long! Bromcom's status page does also appear to cover this at the top of the page itself: "Please note that not every incident is listed on this page. Bromcom updates this page when performance degradation affects a substantial number of customers. If you are experiencing an issue that is not reflected here, please contact support." and provides an alternative avenue to other incidents: "Information regarding more specific ongoing issues with products can be accessed by logging in to https://help.bromcom.com and selecting 'Known Issues'. If you have any feedback on the page, please email [email protected]" Omitting certain types of incidents from an uptime statistics isn't 'manipulation', so long as what is being recorded is clearly defined for the service - which it seems to be.