PhilNeal

The VAT issue disappears in April as the law changes and academies can reclaim VAT from then. (unfortunately DfE didn't know and we coded for it!)

I was using "99%" to mean that the vast majority of our staff our based in the UK and hadn't reached for my calculator! 96% UK based is more accurate and yes off shore does mean that we can scale up and down easily.

Well our part is certainly 99% UK based - almost 500 staff mostly based in Bedford, Chelmsford, Northants & Cirencester. We do employ a number of staff in India but this is because there aren't enough qualified people in the UK!

Vik - it hasn't been a "big issue" but we are being cautious. No data has been lost at all.

That's their MIS not their lesson registration product.

More like a FOI request of the DfE I'd say!

A quick update from our development manager: The biggest challenge with iPad support of SharePoint is that Rich Edit controls won’t work with these iOS devices (current version: iOS 4.0). If you dig deeper into the issue, you will find that iPhone/iPad actually won’t work with any Rich Edit fields on the internet nowadays. The problem is Mobile Safari does not support enough features as Safari does. It’s a trimmed down version of Safari, one of the attribute it does not support is contentEditable. This attribute is widely used in SharePoint (and in Google Docs for instance). It’s a shame since this this attribute is introduced by Internet Explorer 5.5 more than 10 years ago, and is widely supported in all modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. It is a fundamental of creating those rich edit experience within browsers instead of a separate RIA so gradually it’s also accepted in HTML5 standard. It’s believed that iOS 4.2 will support this contentEditable and is due for public release in the summer of 2011 but is available as a developer SDK now. We are investigating to find out what if anything can be done.

You shouldn't believe everything you read!

You do need to be careful with all of this scripting. The SA account completely by-passes every security feature that we have put into SIMS and I wonder if the school fully appreciates that this could be an issue in the future for example you will be able to edit your salary details with no audit. There is an IMS feed available within SIMS that automatically updates a number of VLEs. Quite a number of VLEs automatically link to SIMS. Capita does not support direct writing to or reading from tables in this way.

It's to avoid data protection complaints.

The only other thing that I am aware of that will have to be delayed is the address tidy routinue for importing from MIS systems that are not BS7666 standard. We are also aware of a minor issue with RM's network and .net4 for which there is a workaround and I was told yesterday that Sophos needs a fix too.

Thanks Vik - unfortunately Capita's rules don't allow us to use customer data in tests. Customers can but not us.

We used to involve more sites but found that many didn't have the time to do a through job but we were thinking everything is being hammered. We now limit the numbers and stay in touch with each site on a regular basis.

A quick uodate on spec of kit required. I'm afraid it still isn't clear at all as to the exact requirement. We have 30 trial sites with a wide variety of kit and pupil numbers and there is no obvious pattern as to what gives a speedy response and what doesn't. Some kit that you would have expected to perform badly infact flies. We'll be looking more closely at the variants over the next week and I will post again. I do know that a £30 graphic card made the difference bewteen acceptable and hopeless in one case.

So as the MD of SIMS I am saying its later than we said at BETT 2010; no its never been on our schedule as autumn 2010 but that is what we had thought at the start of 2010. It does deal with the 5 A* to C (of course it now needs to deal with the English BAC as well but that won't be in spring). There are still improvements we know we can make to speed and hence it will work on lower spec kit in the future. I'm not a games player but I understand the same kit spec issues exist in this environment. I'm in Bedford on Monday and will see what the latest guidance is.

I've been away most of this week so haven't caught up with this thread. Firstly at BETT2010 we did think that the second half of 2010 was realistic but it clearly wasn't and by the way real software was being demo'd with one exception. Since then we've changed all of the graphics and taken on board a lot of feedback from schools and in particular ASCL. The brief that we gave the development team was not "it must run on a hair dryer" it was this has got to make it easy for data to be understood. I haven't met a single head and I've met a lot that think that spending a couple of hundred pounds extra on a computer was a problem when assessed against being able to help them understand where they need to put effort into raising attainment. Of course we'll do our best to ensure that it runs on the widest range of kit possible but that is not the priority.

I'm afraid that an academy is outside the domain of an LA and cannot run SIMS under the LA licence. It can of course continue to take support from its old LA and many chose to do so.

Guys this isn't helpful - there are areas of SIMS that NO NOT WORK WITH Office 2010!

SIMS will not work with Office 2010 in all areas until the spring release.

Matt, yes an LA is free to reallocate its schools within its domain. If the school buys additional licences at the standard price they can be novated. FMS won't go to .net - it will skip a generation.

We have done work to support thin clients - don't have the details as I'm stuck in a hotel in the middle of nowhere!

If a SIMS Direct school, i.e. one that has paid for licences at the full price becomes an academy we novate the licence for a fee of £200. LAs bulk purchase at heavily discounted prices and the contract specifically excludes novation i.e. an academy in this situation will have to use some of the start up grant to purchase a licence if they wish to use SIMS. A lot of work has been done to FMS and the Core modules to adapt them to suit academies - most of this work has been wasted however as the DfE has gradually reversed out most of the decisions that had been causing issues.

This thread has gone so far off topic I feel able to contribute! There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that at some point in the future the idea of holding data locally will be regarded as being reckless and indeed limiting. I don’t believe that any school or LA offers a more secure location than a data centre that is patrolled 24/7. (I worked in a school on an estate for over 14 years) However today I think there are very real issues with connectivity that make holding data off-site unattractive but this is only a matter of timing. For me any "cloud solution" has to offer much more than what went before. By that I don’t mean cost savings which in my view have been wildly exaggerated as they don’t take account of the life of the existing kit and remote back-up solutions already in use. What I think cloud has to offer is “iPhone” graphical interfaces that are so much slicker to use minute by minute that make software a delight to use.

The spring release is on track with the exception of Discover. Discover does require a higher spec than the rest of SIMS but believe me it's worth it and you don't need Discover on every laptop. We have improved performance from the field trial and there is probably more that we can do after the first release. If you saw Discover at BETT be prepared to be blown over by the filtering - I know I would say it but it is staggeringly good and you've never seen me make such a claim before!

As always please drop me an email and I'll investigate. We will put our hands up if we've made a mistake!