PhilNeal

@Vikpaw - we do have schools that allow us to use their data in test (having taken steps to remove personal references). It's a vital part of our release process to go through as many data sets as we can. Thanks for the thought Vikpaw.

I'm afraid that you are expecting more than we can achieve and when faults are found we have to delay. Perhaps it is possible to do better and the team will try to do so. We work 29 different returns into our releases that are defined at different times of the year and sometimes require significant clarification. We have to weave that into fixes and enhancements and deal with operating system changes. The delay is actually around 10 working days. The returns for January were issued in October so as far as I am aware there isn't a pressing need to roll this update out to all schools.

Just to confirm what has been said. We do not certify that SIMS will run on Windows 7 but with the Autumn release we haven't found anything that does not and we have tested things thoroughly. This includes System Manager. We have submitted SIMS to Microsoft for certification and there are a few minor things to alter which we have done and so we will receive the official stamp shortly. AIT, George Spencer was authorised to download the Autumn release on 9/11. If its not showing as available please contact our desk.

Siblings are automatically linked via the contact's parental status. If a sibling is wrong it is because the parental status is wrong. There is a tidy tool.

You don't say what system you are using but if its SIMS then yes this can be done. SupportNet is full of assessment experts if you don't get a reply here.

A few years ago we did have a few customers loose reports in an upgrade. I suspect your support team is just being ultra cautious - we don't include this process in our procedures.

It seems that we implemented "all teachers today" which is useful but the easier to implement "all teachers" hasn't been done yet. I await a delivery date for this.

Sounds like someone has written back from Nova-T incorrectly. Your support desk should be able to help quickly.

Time to indentify yourself Alice!

I recommend talking to your LA about finding a solution.

Ric, I'll raise a request for you. No promises though!

Not the question you asked but the timeline will show the appropriate week so you know what to teach.

There should be options to send to all teachers and possibly HoY/House - I'm on a train so can't check!

The send message function does exactly what you want athough to an internal message. You need to have the message box enabled on the home page.

Two observations - the SIMS Profile layout is determined by what you can design in Word. Most LAs have bought a licence that includes Profiles but its possible to have a licence for SIMS that does not include Profiles.

LocalUK agreed and Matt no problem!

Well it's good to see so much interest but this isn't about marketing it is about trying to produce applications that teachers want to use. I've been to a few schools now and spoken to a lot of heads that are excited about the prospect of using mobile devices in schools. HTML is OK for an average application but specific apps for Android or Apple are special.

If you are an LA school bear in mind that the DCSF require details of absence in their return.

Nick - yes the choice is still with schools.

"Any ideas on how to get around the < 4 character username error?" Sorry I don't understand what you are having a problem with?

SOLUS 3 is not about us deciding on when you upgrade (LA may manage this for you) - its about making the whole process smoother. An upgrade that is applied on your command avoids bottlenecks at registration time and tells you when and where there have been failures. There should never have been a need for elevated rights after SIMSPERM has been run. SOLUS3 avoids you even having to visit a new machine to install SIMS.

Thank you to those schools that have signed up. Excellet feedback - so far!

If you are using SIMS in your school you can have an account. eMail me if you like.

We have begun to field trial SOLUS 3 through LAs and schools that we know. I'd love to be able to involve a couple of schools from this community that have had difficulties with the current version of SOLUS. SOLUS 3 will be delivered in two phases. The first (in autumn 2009) aimed at automating deployment of SIMS on workstations, the second (in 2010) at deploying and managing the rollout of SIMS on servers and workstations. SOLUS 3 phase 1 is capable of placing an agent on workstations that install or upgrades SIMS. This agent will download and apply SIMS workstation upgrades in the background without involvement by the users , it will also enable auto deployment of any infrastructure needed for SIMS, in the case of phase 1 this will apply .net framework 3.5. There is a monitor that shows which machines have had agents applied successfully etc. If you are interested in taking part in testing SOLUS3 phase 1, please email [email protected].

We could use such a flag - we did way back in the dbase days. I'm pretty sure that we have a solution coming.