Quark

Looks like more of the same scare tactics, I really wish this would just stop! Given the litigiousness from some MIS companies, in our process our procurement advisor pointed out that there was a difference between Procurement Law and procurement advice. The law is that you must do a formal procurement if the contract value was over £214k, but government advice below that threshold was to ensure you were getting value for money.

There is a primary in our trust migrating over a weekend, and the last one that did so said it was actually a pretty good experience.

Thanks, direct support seems fine for us at the moment, they get back quickly to all our requests but I'll let you know if that changes!

We're also moving over to Arbor payments, would be keen to hear how it's gone for people. ParentPay were going to charge us just for changing provider!

We are migrating all our data and have been told to use the data retention tool in Arbor to manage deletions post migration

I personally think it's enough to be able to access on any device, whether it's an app or a browser. Most providers allow for responsive design (at least in the demo's I've seen), which means in theory it works on any device

Interesting about October half-term. Has anyone migrated mid-term? The autumn term feels easier (we're currently booked in for September)

We were told by ParentPay that not only were their prices increasing, they were going to charge us a fee to connect to our new MIS. We decided to ditch it and just move the payments functionality over to our new MIS provider.

We're keeping a copy of the SIMS backup in the cloud, just for data retention purposes. We were reassured everything should come over to Arbor, so this is really just a backup for us. In the interim, SIMS told us that we could access the software for everything other than the census which is in this article. https://customer.support-ess.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0051049&sys_kb_id=5cc2a109fb9d961085b6f92abeefdc0b&spa=1

We were looking at both options and have gone for Arbor support which one of our staff had experiences with before. Good to know the pros and cons of each

Great to know what can be done. We're planning on going live over the summer break, but will start to roll out some of the additional modules (like assessment) from the end of September once things have settled down.

We're thinking of moving in September this year - how did you find the process in general? Any tips or things you'd have dine differently?