PhilNeal

I confess I was surprised that the increment was down ! I'll ask on Monday but the reissue is just a technicality (at least for now)

They are both the same. It's only been reissued to save problems with schools that had already downloaded without support unit's say so.

Should be back now

You are not describing our Azure offering.

The home page displays cover data. Not sure about paper slips but I'd be surprised if we didn't do them - please call our desk if you don't get a response.

I did discuss the use of InTouch to send school reports out with the ICO policy advisor - she understood what we were doing and didn't raise any red flags based on the "normal" content of a school report. BTW printed school reports aren't encrypted and could end up in the wrong place. One huge message that the ICO gave was that they are there to encourage the appropriate sharing of data and not to block it. I'll take on-board your observations on encryption options for future consideration.

Nobody will give you a definitive answer on issues such as these as they haven't ever been tested in court. However the ICO has issued some helpful advice and I've engaged with a senior policy officer at the ICO who also spoke at two of our conferences. In essence you should not include sensitive data in emails - names are not sensitive data. Anything that gets in the way of critical communication needs to be dealt with practically - so email/txt that a child is not at school should not be encrypted. Anything that could cause embarrassment such as sexual health, special needs should be encrypted. In general a school report does not contain "sensitive" data as "defined by the act" (which is deliberately vague).

AMPARK is not tied to a version so yes.

You will need the summer release to get the correct analysis. However, the release should not have been issued by-passing support units. There was a change in our manager software that wasn't clearly communicated to our release manager - hence the mistake.

I'm told that a patch has been issued and our agent is now aware of their mistake.

There is a patch to correct this. Please drop me an email and I will speak to the desk about the advice given

@matt40k not so!!

Ask a FOI question of the DfE - how many free schools use each system? How many have changed and to what.

Please see below a notice placed on MyAccount earlier today. The SIMS Teacher app high CPU/connectivity issue has now been resolved 25/06/2015 What's the issue? We can confirm that an issue experienced by a small number of schools related to the SIMS Service Manager components of the Teacher App, causing a high level of CPU usage has now been resolved. What caused the issue? Microsoft have now released an update to their Azure Service Relay Bus, which we have implemented for the SIMS Teacher App. The update has been automatically released for Teacher app schools. In addition, Microsoft have published additional guidance that a further two ports should be opened if accessing the Teacher App from behind a firewall (ports 5671 and 5672). Supporting documentation for the Teacher App is also being updated with the latest guidance from Microsoft. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue and thank you for your patience.

@ass17 best to get expert help on this one via the desk.

If the drain was significant we wouldn't be vague!! Clearly if you are running on a hairdryer adding any burden will be a problem!!

Schools are not under obligation to go to a framework - the purchase price is well below the limits!

Profiles allows the setting of a word count.

Please log cases for long report times - bear in mind some reports may be collecting masses of data though

If you're a secondary Express is not up to the job; I'd only deploy in small primary schools.

It shouldn't be slow. Capita & SCOMIS are the ones I know about and would recommend both

Firstly, many schools do use SLG for registration. Secondly you have some options for running on Chromebooks - Remote App works extremely well. Several providers also provide a hosted SIMS service and these may (our definitely does) support Chromebooks.

Schools should not need to restart the SSM Services regularly at all. We are getting very close to resolving the CPU problem that has been afflicting a handful of sites. We are 99% certain that the cause is the firewall closing the continuous connection after a set period at which point a bug in MS's Azure Buzz is maxing out the server. We are in discussions with ISPs and MS. The O365 issue occurs when ADFS is in use and a fix is currently going through test.

I've reported it. It clearly isn't ideal. We think this hasn't been touched for years.

We don't have many cases where SIMS is running slowly. If you have performance issues that are causing usage issues then please raise a case stating where the performance issues occur - delays in seconds etc.