PhilNeal

That's a bit harsh Vik - just because it doesn't have date ranges yet doesn't make it inflexible. The Indy conference last week were bowled over with what they saw. People have asked for date ranges and they are on the development list but there are many ways of dealing with these already in the rest of SIMS.

Steven, I'm now away from a computer until Tuesday so please don't PM me email [email protected] Gary is in charge of the service desks.

Steven please let me have the case number and a description of the problem so that I can investigate.

Give it a try - most laptops work fine.

Actually for display tablets are brilliant. I've just come back from holiday and took my phone, laptop and tablet. A few minor changes to the tablet and I could do most things on them. However don't hold your breath waiting for Apple to make the HTML5 experience as good as an app - they are making billions out of the app market and I think that has influenced them over Flash, SilverLight and HTML5 compatibility.

The VAT126 only affects academies - there are 40 that have downloaded the fix and they will need to reapply that fix but it will be included in the spring release.

Surely it should be school improvement! SouthCoastSaint - from spring you will be able to txt/email staff that haven't completed their marksheets.

It will normally run well on any desk top. Integrated graphics laptops are hit and miss but mostly OK. A netbook is hopeless. It should run on the same box as SIMS unless that's already being thrashed.

Here's the answer from our desk: If they have the Edit/Run permission under "Performance Analysis" and "Performance Analysis > Discover" they will be able to see the Discover icon in SIMS and access the Discover configuration tool. In addition, they will require certain permissions to be able to view/access certain graphs and data in Discover, i.e. the data they can see when logged into SIMS .net under the Student-Teacher view (e.g. student, assessment, attendance information etc...) they will be able to see in Discover. If they do not have permissions in SIMS and cannot see the icon in SIMS, then they can still access Discover (from the start menu or shortcut), but cannot view the data/graphs.

The data is protected by normal permissions - not sure about the application; I'll ask.

If you take a look at the Discover module it should give you an idea of how you can achieve this and more complex alerts.

We've had some reports of this - please raise a case.

As Vik says stickiness is important to get parents to come back to a site regularly. Publishing reports on-line once a term is a great start and it will save you a fortune in printing/collating. Homework info is a real winner – I would think every home with children at secondary school has a discussion on Sunday night as to whether the homework has been done. Then there is all of the event information that should be on-line that parents want to see, menus, fixtures etc. Interestingly one of our staff realised that his child was late for a lot of lessons by logging onto SLG but he hadn’t been looking regularly because the school wasn’t providing additional info that made him want to look every week. As for the way SLG parental web parts look I think they’re pretty good! You can customise it to reflect your school web site – if you don’t customise it, yes it looks vanilla!

SOLUS queries are taking a long time to work through as there are many scenarios to deal with. As a result we are falling behind on our SLA in this area. Unfortunately the skill set is very specialised so increasing the team size is not easy. I apologise for the delays.

If someone would like to publish Serco's guide that would be really interesting!

I don't think that data storage is that much of a problem. Schools get requests for references that date back 20 years or more.

I'e checked with the desk and SOLUS has not been withdrawn. Autumn SIMS is being issued today.

I am still restricted I'm afraid. The tender documents are being reissued today .....

Penfold - this doesn't really reflect the "DfE" framework.

Great news Matt - I'll have to tweet this!

Bidders can be disqualified if they reveal the content of the tender documents so I am very limited in what I can say.

We do test the software endlessly but sometimes errors are invisible until they get out into the field. Every release goes through unit, system, UAT and advanced release to try to get it right. I'm afraid that humans will always make errors but we do everything we can to double and tripple check. I'm very concerned that these errors occurred because there was clearly a process failure - in this case the error is obvious when it occurs but it doesn't go wrong that often so it's difficult to spot unless you have that condition in the data.

@ccamel - do drop me an email and I'll get someone onto it. [email protected]

A quick update. I've been into see our service desk and can confirm that we've had 5 cases where the curriculum structure has been changed incorrectly. We suspect however that although 1000 downloads have taken place not that many schools have actually applied it as we'd have expected more. We're investigating what happened as this is clearly unacceptable but the top priority is providing a fix for schools impacted and getting the release out again.

At present we are trying to establish who has been affected; it certainly doesn't seem to have affected everyone as so far we only have 3 cases and 1000 schools have taken the release. The problem shows up not being able to see registration groups. Needless to say we are doing everything we can to rectify the issue and very much regret the inconvenience that will have been caused.