PhilNeal

GrumbleDook - I'll mention it to the team. Several people have asked about documentation. If you go to SupportNet on the right hand side there is a button marked Documentation. Search for resource number 14181 which is the Quick Reference Sheet (QRS) on this topic designed for teacher use. (Searching on QRS will bring up a complete list.) QRSs can be freely copied in schools that have SIMS.

I was at the ASCL conference last week and found that a large number of SIMS users weren't aware of the Student Teacher view. This view is very powerful in that it shows all aspects of a student that teachers are interested in. You have to elect to have this view as the default through Tools|Setup|Student Teacher view. If you aren't using it I would recommend taking a look. The traffic lights for attendance, achievement, behaviour and assessment are set up globally by the system manager.

I've had a message back from your support desk to say that they haven't been able to get hold of you. We have requested your data as we haven't been permitted to Lan desk in. If you contact them it would be helpful. Thanks.

It sounds like something we should be helping with to me - if you email me with the case details I'll see that it gets further attention. Phil

AdamF - have you logged a case?

If you'd like to make yourself known to me, I will see if there is anything more we can do. Your network should not be brought to its knees running SIMS. If this were a common problem I would know about it!!

The only part of Exams that I am aware of that can run sowly is seating and that is only on the workstation concerned.

Goldenwonder, please get some training! SIMS is very powerful and hugely flexible but you need to understand how it works!!

Thanks - I will ensure this is followed up tomorrow.

We have over 1600 schools using Lesson Monitor and I am absolutely confident that the issue you have doesn't reside within our software. Please identify yourself to me and I will ensure you get the necessary assistance.

Something we haven't plugged enough of is working on two screens. Cover 7 is designed to work on two screens and if you do you should find it very quick to use.

Finally I have an answer - sorry for the delay. For the March release we are moving the temporary Quickletter.doc to the location to better enable it for hosted environments.

Becta's site is the best place to visit.

Not wishing to do myself out of a sale - the requirement doesn't actually require up to the second data. However, some LAs do say that as they take legal action against parents when their children aren't at school, they owe it to the parents to provide real-time data. SLG offers you much more than real time reporting. It offers teachers a chance to work over the internet on their data.

Just to set expectations - if you haven't bought our software to deal with lesson marks, don't expect to see anything in SIMS!

It's through the same root but you are likely to need some consultancy to get you started.

Ask for the CommandLine Reporter documentation in the first place - I suspect you go through Chelmsford so I will alert them. Basically any report that you can create in our Report Generator can be called through the Command Line Reporter from your own program. You shouldn't need Professional Services to get this going.

The SIMS licence holder is the one that can request the documentation so I suspect that is your LA. Your support unit will also want to know that you are calling the BOs from your own software.

I will look into this for you.

Penfold, I don't really understand your MS question. To build an agent we will use our normal programming tools which are MS based - there are also kits available that we will use that are not. A third party won't interface with our agent but with whatever ZIS has been deployed. If you lodge a query through your service desk you can get the complete documentation on our API.

Penfold in answer to your queries: SIF is independent of MS technology IMS write-back I haven't got a firm price but £50K is not unlikely we aren't geared up to support direct table access. We support access via BOs because it means we are free to alter the underlying data structures without worrying about affecting third party access

There are a number of points raised above – hopefully this answers them: Inefficient code will cripple a database but read only access shouldn’t corrupt it. The business objects are functions written in C#; they are what our developers use to read and write to the database. We have offered to write a write back IMS link if someone would like to finance it; to date nobody has and I am hesitant to invest more in this until the SIF agenda is resolved. DCSF/Becta have said that they expect SIF to be the way forwards. For over 24 months we have been pointing out that standard SIF could cause schools to break data protection law. The ZIS manufacturers have begun to address some of the issues we have raised by introducing data filters that control the level of access to the student data object that applications have. Under SIF if you can see a student’s name you can also see their most private details and that isn’t correct.

Schools can access the SIMS business objects layer for their own purpose FOC; these can read and write to the SIMS DB. We also provide the command line reporter to schools FOC as an easy way outputting a wide range of data to be used elsewhere. If the LA is the licence holder you will need their permission to make use of these facilities. We also provide an IMS link FOC which will automatically maintain an external system with pupil names, groups and staff names. Most VLEs are either using or planning to use this link. We are in discussions about developing an IMS write-back of assessment data. SIF may or may not overtake this if Becta can reassure us that standard SIF doesn’t expose schools to data protection risks. If you use SIMS business objects to write data back to SIMS we will deal with any data issues i.e. fix them in the normal way. We get about 5 cases a month of schools that have written to the SIMS DB directly and caused corruption. Typically a school in this position doesn’t mention that this is what they have done and as a result we spend days trying to find out if SIMS could have caused the data to be in the state it is in. If you write back to the database directly we will charge for any data fixing that is required. We employ 4 staff that permanently assist with third party support so we do charge for the commercial use of SIMS business objects.

NoVision - I wouldn't normally add to a thread like this but we most certainly do care! If you have an example of where we have gone wrong then please let me know [email protected].

Recommend that you log a case.