BlackCat80

I honestly got the opposite impression. It felt less like someone giving a confident technical explanation and more like someone reading out a brief written by somebody else. At times it did not even seem to match the slide on screen, which just made it look even more awkward. When you are trying to rebuild trust after this kind of mess, that sort of delivery really does not help. Still not explained what they have broken

It would be funny if it was not so serious. A webinar saying performance issues are resolved, followed by more major issues the next day, sums up the problem perfectly. It is not just the outages now, it is the credibility gap. Bromcom keeps saying things are fixed, while schools keep seeing the opposite. And honestly, if the same failures and the same weak response keep repeating, then the technical people in charge need to change, because this is clearly not being managed properly.

Just use the full link on the button itself. That worked for me. That's how we implemented for our school's intralinks https://services.bromcom.com/CommunicationServer/Customer/AuthenticationService/OAuthLogon.aspx?SSOProvider=Microsoft&SSOAccessKey=cDq7b8%2fuM8lUjh6aI56NltjiU7IZQXJKoWsOynNTkLWKVudD4sJ5DMLUgBPh1pSfxU2P9n3fTxiJ0bD8SdpJCziYIEP%2fUfa4JdDUY%2fQtdLn8sngIB7CvHidmI%2fLW2PrDmYH%2b6mTQiJHsHZwz%2bfEDf%2bVZKZRbta7Lxp0YNF9UNDJRSpoqyObhJgDS4n1SsPygg3jM8VknPfzKxc%2bFikXUQw%3d%3d

RCA published and... This RCA is weak, vague, and honestly does more to expose Bromcom’s weaknesses than reassure customers. After a full week of disruption, all we get is generic wording like “system behaviour under load”, “configuration”, “request contention” and “retry behaviour”. That describes the symptoms. It does not properly explain the real cause. The biggest question is still unanswered: what changed on or just before 3 March that suddenly triggered this? Schools did not all suddenly change how they used the system overnight. Morning registration is one of the most predictable usage peaks imaginable. So why did a platform that is supposed to support schools every day suddenly start falling over at the same time each morning? That is why this RCA feels so weak. It avoids saying what actually changed, what exactly failed, why it took so many days to understand, and why Bromcom was giving customers reassurance before the issue was properly understood. Over the course of the incident we heard about scaling, gateway bottlenecks, caching, software changes and other fixes. Now the RCA rolls all of that into soft, abstract language that avoids real accountability. To me, that exposes a much deeper weakness inside Bromcom. It suggests a platform where engineering teams do not fully understand the knock-on effect of changes under real load, and where leadership is either unwilling or unable to explain clearly what really happened. That is not a small concern for a system handling statutory attendance and other critical school operations. Calling the overall risk “Low” is also frankly insulting. Schools were forced onto paper registers, staff lost time, trust in the system was damaged, and some users could not even rely on whether marks had actually saved. That is not how customers experience “low risk”. A proper RCA would have clearly answered: what changed why it changed what broke why existing safeguards failed why early fixes did not work what process and leadership changes are being made to stop this happening again This does not do that. It reads like a carefully sanitised incident summary written to reduce embarrassment, not a transparent root cause analysis written to rebuild customer confidence. If Bromcom wants trust back, it needs to be much more honest than this.

Yes 100% there are problems since last week. Comms very unreliable.

14 days for a Root "Clause" Analysis?

That sounds entirely believable, and if true it actually makes Bromcom’s position look worse, not better. It suggests they are pushing bits of traffic onto different subdomains as a live mitigation, then discovering knock-on issues with CORS, reporting, mobile endpoints and signpost switching as they go. That is not a platform under control, that is a platform being patched in production. Add in the long-standing CSS/minification mess and it points to the same conclusion again: this is not just a capacity issue, it is deeper problems.

That honestly makes it sound worse, not better. Browser caching for static assets is basic engineering and I am pretty sure it was already there long before last week. I even remember this being looked at with Smoothwall who were investigating our firewall issues a few years back. Surely something changed last week that caused this. These assets are not new. Either Bromcom broke or bypassed caching with a recent change, feels like they are dressing up as if it is a new fix. Neither reflects well on their technical teams. Very bad!

100%... sure... 🤣

Honestly, this is starting to look like outright incompetence. The same mess in September, January, and now the same mess again: repeated outages, shifting excuses, failed promises, and yet more bottlenecks only being found once schools are already being hit. That screams a technical team that does not properly understand the knock-on impact of its own changes. Whether it is weak bad change control or senior technical staff/leaders who are simply out of their depth, the outcome is the same. Bromcom looks like it is debugging their platform live in front of paying customers. For a school MIS, that is completely unacceptable and frankly embarrassing.

I respect your opinion and my opinion is that's the wrong trade-off. Schools should not have to choose between an affordable MIS and one that actually works at 9am. And let’s not pretend Bromcom is cheap out of charity. Schools are still paying serious money, so expecting reliability during morning registration is hardly unreasonable. “Be grateful it is not even more expensive” is not much of a defence when the service has been failing repeatedly during a core safeguarding process. My pick would be the first one.

If Bromcom has built a platform where one integration can help tip core morning operations over, then the engineering is not robust enough. And if “we prefer not to spend too much on infrastructure” is part of the explanation, then schools are effectively being told reliability was sacrificed to protect Bromcom’s philosophy. That is not admirable, it is unacceptable.

Very true, we should probably stop expecting them to be ready for something as unexpected as schools taking registers at 9am.

I am not convinced by this explanation. If this was mainly a capacity issue, why did it take nearly a week to increase capacity for a very predictable morning peak? The real question is why this suddenly started happening middle of last week. Schools did not suddenly change their behaviour overnight, so it is hard to believe this was just a random demand spike. It feels much more likely that some underlying platform, infrastructure or software change triggered this, and the extra capacity is only treating the symptom, not explaining the cause. Lots of words but actually says nothing...

I do not think many of us want to go back to SIMS, but that does not mean schools will just keep accepting this either. If Bromcom cannot provide a stable and reliable service, people will start looking seriously at Arbor instead. That is the reality. After nearly a week of issues, and still no proper explanation, confidence is being damaged badly.