PhilNeal

We had talks with the DfE last year and have another session booked. When we spoke to them they expected 200 academies but of course that number has increased. We will see what comes out from our discussions. CyberNerd, what exactly do you mean when you say "When they were in breach"? We haven't been in breach at any point. As for the £75m story, that was pure fiction. One of the other complaints was that our licences were too cheap by the way!

In SIMS you can have an unvalidated address. Address validation can be from our server which has information supplied by DfE or it can be from the LA's database.

Well we've won 4 out of the last 5 tenders; 3 LAs are changing to SIMS. This has increased our market share quite a lot over the last 12 months so I'm confident that we are offering good value compared to others in the market. The whole academy movement has created massive costs - its not only software changes, its account managerment & infrastructure changes etc. There are already 4* as many academies as there were LAs. LAs are a very cost effective way of dealing with collection of revenue etc and I'm afarid dealing with individual schools costs much more. This isn't a political statement just a fact.

It's automatic - the teacher will see their marksheets.

LosOjos- we do provide a SIMS merge for teams and can offer a service direct to schools if required. Its been available for quite a while and has been improved over the years. (I hope it wasn't one of our people that said it couldn't be done.) For assessment data, if you can get it out of your current system into Excel you can bring in virtually anything quite easily on your own. SIMS will match on quite a number of fields - all you have to do is define the assessments. Schools quite often use this to bring in all sorts of departmental assessments when a school policy to use SIMS is brought in.

As mentioned earlier in this thread, if you'd like to make contact with me I will get an expert to contact you and if necessary visit to find ot more.

We have a lot of experience of bring data in from other systems and have consultants who do this as a full time job.

The last major addition to Nova-T6 will be combing charts (whatever they are) in autumn. I will be arguing to turn off T4 in spring 2012 but there will be a user consultation group to be sure.

Facinating views about Becta - can't say I noticed them favouing anybody!

Sorry resin1 didn't mean to be defense.

Thanks Anjelica - the team is right about SLG not being enough but they shouldn't be charging that as its in your own name already. The refund from the LA is an important figure.

Resin1 you should not assume that academies are a no cost extenstion for Capita far from it; the disaggregation costs are huge.

Anjelica if you already hold a SIMS licence in your own name there is only a nominal transfer fee. Our AM quote would include support from Capita. The other important factor is that if you are under an LA they can claim back the AM they have paid and they might pay that back to you. I would have expected your licence charge to be around £12K.

Finally had a chance to double check this and I'm afraid it was me that is confused - basically I had mis read the posting. The way SOLUS3 works is that it takes the download and then deploys it including to new machines. However if you have deployed already and then install SOLUS3, SOLUS3 contains nothing to deploy until the next release. So install SOLUS3 first then you can deploy SIMS. I'm told that the documentation does say this but I have to admit that if you have to read the manual there's a problem!

Do contact your support unit - I'm pretty sure all banks accept our formats now. If all else fails drop me a note and I'll get an expert onto it for you.

We do provide this for hosted schools so it is possible - I'd say essential really to get the school customised look.

There is no caching of data. If you put your laptop to sleep it will awake with the screen you were on.

The report generator can give you counts.

I'm pretty sure you mark the day as not used for teaching.

If you have a domain it most certainly can deploy to a new pc. Please let me have the details of who you spoke to so I can see where the confusion is. (I hope it's not me that's confused!) Many thanks Phil

We won our last two LA tenders by providing SIMS as a cloud solution. The one before we won because SIMS could be deployed locally. It all depends on your connections.

Try it on your kit. We haven't found any obvious pattern. The release version is far faster than that of the trial.

Please call our desk for advice.

No need to replicate the data. A single instance of SLG can serve both schools. Parents combine accounts. I suspect you will need some consultancy from us to get it up and running.

As long as you have a domain, SOLUS 3 can deploy onto a completely new machine.