PhilNeal

Roguesooty thanks for your reply and I'm sorry that we don't meet your needs. One top ten Independent School has changed to SIMS in the last 2 months having throughly reviewed the market and we have a number of others on our books.

Roguesooty just for the record we have +500 Independent schools using our software.

The ruling on this issue has changed and you can keep all relevant data i.e. the lot. You may even get to keep your DfE number. Please contact our service desk for advice.

I'd be happy to arrange for you to visit one of our partner schools who use SIMS throughly. There are about 50 of them around the country so hopefully there's one near you. Drop me a note if you'd like to pursue it.

There is no legal requirement to report on-line although ASCL strongly support the concept; Becta could only ever recommend that schools follow this route. There is however a huge uptake of reporting to parents in real time taking place across the country. Equally having a VLE is only a recommendation. Ofsted will however be looking for evidence that there is regular exchange of information and a dialogue with parents that is more regular than once a year.

Creese, if you’d like to let me have the case reference I will assign a top engineer to try to solve a problem but I have no idea who you are. We have had some binary issues with SupportNet i.e. it has been down on occassions but that isn’t what you seem to be describing Yesterday there were two pages of SupportNet threads from 8:00 to 18:00 so SupportNet is running; there isn’t a thread about this issue but I will start one. We take around 200 web cases every day. I’ve seen around 50 LA reps in the last three days talking minute levels of detail and it wasn’t raised – I think they would have been shouting if this was widespread. We have had problems that are ISP specific i.e. getting to our address server, so it’s not impossible in my view to have something that could be affecting you at home and in the office.

Creese, I'm beginning to think this could be at your end. Please log a call so that we can investigate. Thanks Phil

Hi Dobs - We have a partner Group Call that has produced a SIMSM SIF agent; it could be that they would be prepared to write an agent for ONE, indeed they may already have done so? You may have read the DfE report on SIF which raised a number of concerns over its future; there is a suppliers meeting with DfE coming up that might make the future of SIF in the UK clearer.

We think we’ve traced the route of this to intermittent problems with some of the older server infrastructure. A reboot looks like it has fixed it for now but we are still keeping it under observation. New hardware is due to be installed.

Likewise! Sorry

Well spotted matt40k! I wasn't going to say anything but its been a long day!

SIF is not designed for dual ownership of data in mind i.e. where neither the school nor the LA has exclusive say on the correctness of the data. Any rejection of data just ends up on the server and in an LA there are thousands of disputes at this time of year. As a consequence SIF is not, at present, suitable for SIMS/ONE transfer.

I suspect it is working, at least for most cases or we would have said something. Creese have you been contacted? Thanks Phil

Sounds like a permission issue. Our standard install deals with this so that admin rights are not required for upgrades.

I've reported this to our MIS team.

Box_1: There are various ways in which txt, voice and email solutions can be developed. Whilst an email solution could sensibly be designed to run from a school site, txt & voice solutions need specialist arrangements. To simplify the school end, much of the processing is handled at our centre and for that there needs to be a secure link between school and centre hence the VPN. Why a VPN ~ well it avoids Certificates, Firewall Rules, IP Addresses challenges that using HTTPS would bring. Headers are stored in the SIMS DB but the detailed content is retained in our centre. Our technical architects designed it this way as emails and attachments can indeed be very large. Responses txts etc from recipients are received by our centre and then fed back into the SIMS DB; hence the need to be able to write to the SIMS DB. All stored responses are accessible automatically from within SIMS; the connection to the centre is seamless. NuttyProf: Servers are now being manufactured on an industrial scale and delivered in containers that just plug in. Google, Amazon & MS have vast server sites that can now host databases at a fraction of the cost of doing it yourself. I think it is only a matter of time before the norm is to host data in the cloud and to hold it locally will just be odd. I’m really interested in when this change will bed in because we need to be deigning such solutions now.

This problem isn't on my radar at the moment - could you give me a case reference please so that I can follow it up. Thanks

We need a secure link to our server centre which sends out the txt and emails. Your messages are also stored on our server for future reference; our designers were concerned about just how much space could be taken up with messages and so a decision was taken to retain them at our centre.

I completely agree with Ketlane (apart from his choice of MIS of course ) I have been into tiny schools that make really good use of their MIS.

Nuttyprof you've take this thread off topic which is a shame as the topic of when it will be considered to be irresponsible/quaint to hold data in a school is fascinating and worthy of debate!

Well you could PM me but Gadstone Primary gives me a clue!

False - if you are a LA primary school in Stoke-On-Trent you are a licenced SIMS user. Shall I get your LA to contact you?

If you are a licenced SIMS user in Stoke LA there is a support unit you can contact. If you want a direct relationship with us you can have that too.

Deleted by author ~ sorry decided that I shouldn't say that!

Much appreciated - I will follow up once I have the details.