ric_p

Yeah, iSAMS Central was dead in the watwr as soon as we got access to Data Share. You can ask for access to the raw tables, which are also available though snowflake, so you can basically recreate any of your previous SQL queries in there.

At the moment we've connected our current BI tool (Looker Studio) to Snowflake, by subscribing to Central Connect. We started using iSAMS Central but the pre-built dashboards didn't suit our purposes, and didn't offer enough configurability. I'd like to Connect snowflake into BigQuery, as this will allow us to query it with our non-ISAMS data seamlessly. I've been working with the team at iSAMS and feel we're quite close, though there seems to have been a winter hiatus in progress. When and if we get this running, I'll post an update here.

How does that play with your other platforms connected to your MIS?

@FloraDora Is there any official confirmation of the rewrite? I think I've been hearing about it for several years already. If there was I could ask our end-users to hang on for a while longer! @Jamman960 this is the reason that we want to switch as we have individual contacts populated into iSAMS from OpenApply, and then being updated by individual parents in MySchoolPortal.

Bit of context - we're considering switching our dual contacts to single ones, but it'll be a big job to switch all our systems that we've designed around this. So I was wondering if most people use the dual or single types, and particularly to hear from anyone who's made the switch? Thanks in advance. The iSAMS forums are often quiet so I thought I'd get more feedback here!

We're literally in the process of implementing MSP with iSAMS so feel free to reach out if you have any questions, though not about Exam Manager as we don't use that. The new iSAMS portal is an upgrade of the interface and has seemingly no new features.

We're looking at Firefly as a portal tool. Does the PTC booking and video work well?

We've recently ditched InVentry for Sign-In App as InVentry was so clunky and highly expensive for subscription and terminals. We just use old iPads as sign-in terminals. Having said that, neither platform is designed for or suitable for taking individual Club registration. We've been using SchoolsBuddy happily for preference based sign-up, performing allocations and then registration.

Can I resurrect this thread with a different quesiton about how well FireFly works integrated with iSAMS? We're considering using as our one-stop-shop parent portal and I'd be grateful to hear about what it does and doesn't do well. Thanks in advance.

Amazing. I wish I foudn this community earlier. Thank you both @dmj and @dhicks for your detailed suggestions and advice. I'll be spending my afternoon on this.

Firstly, 3 responses since I posted this a couple of hours ago! Thank you all for your input, I only just signed up this afternoon after finding this thread when googling "isams" and "looker studio" so I'm genuinely grateful for the comments you've added. For several years I've been running a VM on our network using Visual Studio and SSMS to access the Db for reporting purposes and writing simple queries. If I could somehow pull whole tables of data on a daily basis and upload them to BigQuery that would be the ideal. My next thought was an API and I've been experiementing a bit with using Postman, which is helped me get my head around REST api's a bit but I'm not sure where to go from here, to building one. Recommendations on tutorials or sites very welcome.

Sadly iSAMS Central is iSAMS expensive propritery solution, that allows for very little cusomisation from what I'd previously seen. I've got a lot of experience building Look Studio dashboards already and it's great when you have a big data set already spat out form iSAMS, but it's proving very difficult to build dashboards with live data. Has anyone got experience with connecting directly to the iSAMS database?