PhilNeal

As you will be exposing children's data to the Internet be sure that any solution you put in place has been pen tested. Approx £10K a go!

Someone has pointed out to me that the documentation is actually available on EduGeek at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/14078-sims-3rd-party-access-documentation.html

Your support unit can request a copy of the manual for you.

PreDefined Reports can be run via the commandreporter.exe. I'm told that some reports require runtime parameters which will have to be provided as a string or in an input filename parameter as part of the command line. The report generator is extremely powerful and I would recommend asking on SupportNet as you will find there are many experts on the SIMS Report Generator that are willing to assist. You could also ask your support team to log a specific question and that way it will find its way to an expert.

This isn't correct behaviour so something is wrong with your set-up. A check for the lastest version of SIMS will take a fraction of a second when the config is right. It could be the anti-virus software that needs changing. As mentioned before you will find a paper in "Sticky Items" on SupportNet that takes you through the possible causes. If you don't get anywhere then please contact your support provider.

I would check with the fire service. They will almost certainly ignore any records that the school has and search every room.

You can get a rough idea about SIMS from demos that are on our web site. Product Demonstrations - Capita Education Services I say rough because they are actually quite old now and in need of updating.

Please log a case via your support unit. What you have done is perfectly normal and should not present a problem. If it does we will fix it because it would be our fault not yours!!

I suspect this is to do with the Windows default program settings on the machine.

Bromcom can write back to SIMS.

The screen you need is in SIMS.net. The AD provisioning area.

If you'd like to identify yourself to me, I will see what we can do to help you. User defined permission structures should not cause this issue. Try assigning one of our standard permissions to a person and see if it still occurs.

Schools and more particularly LAs have time to move from the old Attendance 6 to the new Attendance 7. Once your support unit is ready they apply a licence patch which turns on the Attendance 7 menus. Attendance 6 & 7 use the same lookups.

This sounds very odd indeed. Could something be putting back an old copy of SIMS.DB?

I would be really grateful if you would complain directly to the service managers if you feel that you have had poor service from the desk. I can't follow up complaints from anonymous postings.

We have moved to SQL Server but no plans to move to .net with FMS. Next year we are doing a lot of polishing FMS and doing more work with electronic trading.

We release to support units and they then chose when to release to their schools.

As you say we have now moved to on-line working from home and dropped Teacher's Desktop. The recent Becta guidance rules out taking pupil data out unless it is encrypted which adds expense too.

Sorry Steve - it will be supported through to the end of the current renewal.

Sorry we are about to end Parents Gateway as most users have gone to the SIMS Learning Gateway (SLG) - we are literally now writing to the remaining 6 customers. I would recommend looking at whether your LA can host SLG for you as that means you can share the cost of the hardware and software. We can offer a hosted solution if they can't.

The SIMS web part integration is to allow teachers etc a single root into everything they need. SIF will cover all data items - we did run a small scale pilot in Northern Ireland that transferred assessment data. It did work, not real-time but useful.

There are a lot of strands to this thread. Firstly linking SIMS to a number of VLEs is already happening via the built in IMS links. This can update a VLE with pupil names, groups and teachers. The next issue is dropping our web parts into a SharePoint based VLE. This is possible but some LA contracts are tight and VLE producers are concerned about dropping our web parts into their infra structure without doing a trial first. I believe that Sandwell schools have (or will have) LP+ with SIMS web parts installed. Another issue is SIF. Around 14 LAs have expressed interest in us developing these links. On Wednesday SIFA is meeting to discuss the next steps on SIF in the UK. It would be premature to say anything more until this meeting. I hope this helps.

I would try asking the same question on SupportNet for a wider range of responses!

Jake courses are available from a variety of places - if you are an LA school that is probably the cheapest place to try first. The following link takes you to our courses Education Support Services - Capita Education Services To get the best out of ANY management system the senior leaders have to be on board and understand what (not how) it can do. We have consultants that can assist with setting up the system both technically but more importantly in such a way that it meets your needs. These consultants can work in your school or if you want to club together that is fine too. The technical overhead after SIMS has been set up should be minimal. J17Sparky if the SIMS upgrade has been going wrong the next release will do too - something is wrong with your set-up and it needs to be rectified. You do not need to give everyone high access rights to do upgrades. I would really like to solve this so please get in touch.

j17sparky - if you'd like to make contact with me I will speak to your LA and see what we can do to sort out the issues. I am 100% certain that it can be fixed.