PhilNeal

I'm afraid that we came unstuck with producing MSIs. We employed a specialist company but they failed to deliver.

The other aspect of this request is data protection. We've recently had very practical discussions with the ICO and they are all for appropriate communication electronically as long as there are adequate safeguards. Importing a pupil list and auto matching to records seems to me to be a little risky. Get the wrong pupil and you are in trouble. In many schools there are duplicate names - loads of them. The CTF match includes DOB etc. to try to minimise the problem.

@howartp I can't promise that. Personally I would devolve responsibility to the people creating the demand so they send the messages out.

I haven't got that much hair left to pull out

@minimoo I agree that killing the SIMS session can't do any harm as the upgrade taking place would have invalidated any changes that had been made by that user. When Jon calls you please discuss the bluescreen.

@minimoo I'm pleased to say that V3.8 is planned to allow forced closure of SIMS and immediate upgrading should SIMS not be at the correct version.

It depends entirely on how much data you wish to preserve. CTF is clean but limited if you've been a power user.

@MrMatt very annoying and embarrassing; sorry. The effect of the error is very minor but I accept that it does knock confidence.

A few years back water got into the SIMS servers in two schools in NI. The heads of those schools said they would not open if SIMS was not operational. Fortunately the local team repaired the damage in time.

Just for the record - I'm not expecting to go under! Even if Capita did, SIMS is a very viable business that the administrators would sell on. The issue is really what contractual reassurances a customer would expect in the unlikely event of ...

Many thanks for contributions to this thread; it has helped my thinking a lot. I am quite surprised that this issue hasn’t been flushed out before as it is so fundamental. No one has pointed to an existing scheme that provides protection to end users so I will pursue this with government however I suspect that this will be regarded as an industry issue. In the absence of any protection scheme there do appear to be some clear indicators: Under no circumstances should we host the data directly ourselves otherwise an administrator could close things down. We need a contract with the hosting company that guarantees continued access to the data for a specified period. This doesn't provide protection should the hosting company go under so perhaps it is necessary to have a second provider mirroring the data? All this puts up the cost of the solution though!

I’d be grateful for any pointers as to what arrangements schools expect cloud MIS suppliers to have in place to ensure that should the supplier (or the contracted hosting party) go into administration, the data and processes would continue to be available immediately. I’m not expecting Capita to go under but I am expecting to have to provide assurances that should it happen, schools’ data and processes would be safe at least until a new supplier can be selected and the data moved. In the perpetual licence on premise world, customers are not immediately affected if their supplier suddenly ceases to operate; the processes and data remain accessible. In the cloud world I have yet to find an established safety net should the unthinkable occur? Whilst I would expect the appointed administrators to try to keep the business going until a buyer could be found, that isn’t something that is contractually binding. I have discussed this matter now with many people including some major contributors to this forum; I haven’t found anyone that has a neat solution.

Have you raised a case?

It's due on 30th June.

The summer release makes this possible.

Strangely enough I had a conversation with one of the mods on here on Friday who sang SLG's praises!

@CAM this is one of the issues that will need to be addressed if the grand DfE data gathering exercise takes place; there won't be a census day and a forced clean-up. @Wabey. You probably know if you enter the behaviour via the class (right click), location is auto-filled.

You need to be careful about mandatory fields. Schools need to get children into classes ASAP and that means getting them into the MIS. Forcing entry into fields risks the guess just to get the child onto the system. Better to allow a null entry and come back later.

We believe the problem is caused when the template is opened and saved in another version of Word. Using Word to build templates is a very straight forward way to allow end users to create fantastic reports for parents inserting data from SIMS. The problem is that it is impossible to see the formatting characters that become inserted into the binary format of the template. We are planning to move to the XML templates that will make it a lot easier to check out the structure but we are wary of moving too quickly as so many schools are still using old copies of Word. I have asked the architects to see if we can do more to programmatically find out what is causing corruption.

That's good to hear. Thanks for letting us know.

If we are hosting your database this is an issue we should address - BACS is an important service. Please re-contact the desk and I'm sure they will help. Please raise to a manager if you don't get a proper answer.

An address that isn't validated won't cause a school too much trouble. It usually happens when a new estate/house is built and Ordinance Survey hasn't caught up. As @Matt40 says many LAs point SIMS to their database which could well be more up to date (LAs approve all house builds) Accurate addresses are really important though as social services may need to know exactly where a child is living.

Please drop me a note and I will assign someone to solving the problem.

Pressure from users! It is going in the summer release!

@maak have you logged a case with us?