Wizard101

I think its time for SIMS Nextgen.

Dear Customer, We want to provide you with a transparent update on the performance issues that have continued today, and the steps we are taking to resolve them. Following this morning's peak period, our teams identified that while the infrastructure changes applied yesterday successfully increased capacity at the gateway level, some requests were then constrained by other parts of the platform further down the chain. This resulted in further errors for a significant number of customers this morning. We recognise this is frustrating, and we sincerely apologise that the disruption has continued. We want to be clear that our teams have not stopped working on this. As part of today's investigation, we identified and addressed an additional bottleneck within the gateway layer that was contributing to the behaviour under peak load. This fix has already been applied. In addition, our engineering teams have identified four specific software improvements that will reduce unnecessary load on the platform during peak usage periods. These changes are currently being implemented and will be rolled out progressively over the next 48 hours, subject to testing and validation. We will continue to monitor the platform closely during tomorrow morning's register period and will provide a further update later today via Email, the Bromcom Status Page and the Community portal. We sincerely apologise that this issue has not yet been fully resolved. This remains our absolute priority, and we are committed to restoring the reliable service you expect from Bromcom.

its actually quite amazing

I'll see everyone back here tomorrow.

Yeah just how it was fundamentally built and the optimisation seems poor. Like they didn't build for any scalability or understand how much data their system would be working with and didn't plan for it. Everything requires a new window to be opened up, It feels clunky like its barely standing when I use it, you make a report it feels like it's about to die.

VS Code was simple, We put it on a Student Image. Extensions/Addons are blocked by defaults. If they require extensions for their work they have the send in a request, we then check if the extension and add a rule on a firewall for those extensions. (You need the actual cdn path to where VScode is downloading it from, haven't had to do this in a while so cant remember from the top of my head). Probably some better ways to do this.

To be honest, I've only heard good things about Arbor not sure why our school decided to go with Bromcom. Us as the IT team strongly advocated for Arbor as some of us were familiar with it

Understandable, I asked Bromcom last week if they've identified the root cause of the issues and haven't heard anything back. Asked again today, I'm not expecting them to give us an answer tbh

Agreed those are same issues I had with SIMS and disliked, I didnt have the final decision in the move to Bromcom but I had my doubts on the reliability and raised this concern. If the cloud MIS is not going to work, I'd prefer to go back to on-prem SIMS. Yes, working with SIMS could be a bit of a headache and tedious, but you got used to their system and how it worked. Their support was pretty good and helped resolve issues as well. I could get on the server and see what's going on and get it working again for staff, and if it was something I thought needed further investigation I could raise with SIMS support to help me look into it. This is affecting the whole operations at the school. Schools run of MIS and the MIS being down for 5 days (more or less), is unacceptable. I haven't been given any Root cause analysis or anything. Just "The Team have seen the service return to normal operation. They are continuing to investigate the root cause of the issue this morning, and will update you ASAP" But yet I've yet to see their RCA. The same issue happened beggining of February and the start of September which they have said they fixed. I don't know what kind of fixes they are doing but clearly its not a fix. And I'm getting tired of having to tell staff bromcom is down again every morning. P.S. Maybe its just a Bromcom thing

M Also I think most teachers will be against getting the app on their personal phones... Im pretty sure its against GDPR also... We already had a hard time getting them to use 2FA

Had a SIMS server before. Yeah, there was issues but we knew how to and were able to get on the server fix the issues so wasn't too much of a problem. With these cloud MIS its just waiting for a band aid fix with no explanation what's going on or whats causing the issues.

Haha was going to check in and ask whos willing to wager it goes down today. Behold it has gone down once again. Rather have my own on-prem MIS that way I can at least resolve the issue, no clue why people want a cloud MIS.

Here we go again

IMO, Bromcom is less work for us as IT. Previously had SIMS and had constant tickets relating to SIMS. For teachers, there are some inconveniences/irritations with reports and UI. Bromcom is working to implement features they lack and improve their system based on feedback and have a roadmap you can view. I think in about 2/3 years Bromcom will be a solid choice for both IT and Teachers. As of now, I think it's just annoyances with previous features staff were used to having in SIMS which are not available in Bromcom as of yet.

We have exam accounts. These are setup using folder redirection. Is it possible using Group Policy or any other method to restrict saving to any other location besides the documents folder inside their home profiles. Running into a issue where students are saving to This PC, causing work not to be their when they sign into the exam account on different devices. Just want to try to simplify things in our environment. We've already set the default location to their home profile but some students like to click around and change where its saving to.