PhilNeal

Thanks. BTW just because a case is escallated doesn't mean that they can't continue to work nor is every case something we have got wrong.

At present 2% of schools have cases that are escalated. If you let me know who you are I will follow this up for you. I am aware that some postings on EduGeek are not what they seem to be – I’m sure that yours is genuine but almost invariably when I offer to help I never hear a word!

Button_Ripple, if you drop me an email I will find out for you. I still suspect that this is about your support contract rather than licencing. Some of our support contracts cover PCs.

SIMS is an all school licence so there is nothing more to pay to us for putting SIMS in classrooms. Your bursar may be referring to a support contract that is for 8 users - that is more than just SIMS. Working from home - you can do this via thin client such as Citrix or Terminal Services. Many schools now are using our SIMS Learning Gateway whicj allows teachers to work from home as well as meeting the enguaging with parents adgenda. SLG is an extra.

I think but am not sure (and there's nobody near me to ask) that FMS will work on a 64bit server because its now SQL Server. The client is a different matter.

Kiran kindly pointed me to this page. I don't think we've looked at Win 7 yet - I think we'll wait until MS makes it completely compatible with its own tools before we try it out. Don't think there should be too much of a problem though other than yet another huge test matrix. Win 7 does look good though. What do you mean when you say FMS doesn't install the same twice??

Kiran, if you don't get a response here - try SupportNet as there is a very active group of users that can assist.

Lots of schools start the new year early - it is a way to ensure that the last few weeks of term are productive. Don't use paper registers or your data will be wrong!!

I'm back from BETT and what better way to spend a Saturday night that on EduGeek! I can confirm that we have an AD provisioning tool - it's massively scalable accross multiple schools in an LA.

I would absolutely love to be able to separate out cenus etc upgrades from everything else but we get changes every 3 or 4 months that have to be issued. Working enhancements that schools want into a constantly shifting returns background is hugely difficult to manage.

This fault code isn't in our solutions so please log a call.

No the census cannot be just a report! We have to validate the content before sending it onto DCSF - if we didn't your school would be getting lots of phone calls. The DCSF actually produce the validation software that we have to call from SIMS. We also allow staff to drill directly into the data to correct errors - without this feature the census would occupy even more time.

We used to refer to version numbers but people couldn't remember those so we moved to using months. It is the December release but we are late! (I bet if we'd called it the January release someone would have said oh no this is the December release but late!!) The only reason that we took the decision to release is because we were asked to by quite a number of schools and LAs to get the front end bug fixes out to them ASAP. If you don't need the release you don't have to take it.

Try this: Becta Schools - Extending opportunities - Parental engagement

The government's target for England is real time reporting - not three reports a year! It doesn't really matter what we think as we will be judged by this requirement. One LA recently pointed out that as it took parents to court for the non-attendance of their children, it took the responsibility of letting parents know immediately that there was a problem.

There has never been a need for staff to have full access rights to use or upgrade SIMS.

Unit-E & SIMS are aimed at two different markets and have completely different code bases.

Its not at BETT.

Please be aware that the patch is LA specific because the values that are changed depend on the LA ledger codes in use. Not all LAs have requested that we do the necessary work.

I'm afraid that System Manager doesn't have a great interface. You should find that you have all of the documentation already loaded on your server. You can find a permission matix on our web site SupportNet.

Matt the shot you have put up is fairly empty. The idea is to have active widgets that display information that you need to do your job. Over the next 12 months there will be around 25 different widgets that monitor the database to show you what you need to know. So for example you might be interested in missing registers, birthdays this week, attendance in your house, behaviour incidences as they happen etc etc. A single click on a graph of attendance stats will tell you which children are included and a further click shows the full pupil summary. We are trying to get data presented rather than you having to dig.

I think that is possible now - if you'd like to email me with the output you need I will get someone to take a look at what you are trying to do. There are some really expert users that are always willing to help on SupportNet.

Its possible to do very complex traffic lights directly in SIMS and hundreds of schools do this all of the time. It is also possible to produce a marksheet that includes all of the data you require (whole school and mulitple aspects) and export directly to a spread sheet.

We do support Vista on a workstation - am I missing something?

Becta has only just recommended this for teacher access only. There is nothing in our design that prevents this from being implemented and we are looking at options that can be deployed.