MattMitchell

Works fine over VPN for me - most of the time it's a fairly low-bandwidth app. The client upgrade will take a long time though! If you want lots of staff to access remotely, then it's probably better to get SLG or one of the equivalent products.

If you have a yes/no gradeset, with 1 for yes and 0 for no, then the mean value gives you the percentage. Otherwise, a chance-type analysis can show you this for a given group, e.g. Year 11.

Some things are easier than others. For a breakdown of numbers/percentages of students attaining L5+, L6+, L4, L5, etc in a each subject, an aspect analysis is the way to go. Group filters (some of which will have to be assessment user defined groups unfortunately) will allow you to restrict this to FSM/Non-FSM, SEN Action, Action+, EAL, etc, etc. For 5+ A*-C, you need a "review" marksheet that will calculate this figure from attainment/predictions for all subjects, and then you can use a group analysis to show 5 A*-C for all, boys, girls, fsm, non-fsm, sen, etc, etc in a given year. Alternatively, aspects that contain 5 A*-C, 5 A*-G, 5 A*-C E&M, etc, etc would allow you to show each of these for a given set of filters. Chance analyses are good for conversion data, e.g. how many/what percentage of students who were >L4, at L4, >L4 on entry are predicted 5 A*-C, etc. Result set analyses, if you have your result sets set (!) up in the right way, will allow you to see how a cohort is progressing through the school, and again, filtering by various groups will let you modify the cohort. The biggest catches, really, are that: - things like SEN status have to be done as an assessment group, which means you need to modify the group membership semi-manually every so often - you can't do a chance analysis of a non-assessment field against an assessment aspect - it's all a little user-unfriendly, and there doesn't seem to be much access control or read-write restriction (although I've not played with that side of it heavily) - you are only allowed 25 (yes, twenty-five) characters for the name of an analysis grid. This really doesn't make life easy if you want several grids At the moment, I'm playing with a couple of possibilities: - make a suite of grids externally via the import XML option (I do this with marksheet templates at the moment so I can modify my "KS3 Y9 template template" rather than making new templates for English, Maths, Science, History, etc - maybe just exporting the data and analysing it externally. The one thing that is fantastic with the analysis grids, is that if you add them to a user's homepage, they can double-click a cell to see which students fit in the group, and then click on a student's name to see their details. The grids are also "live", so that if an assessment is changed, re-populating the grid will reflect those changes instantly. The thing that is not fantastic about it all, is that there is no link in the other direction, for example, to get a good overview of a student's attainment given their name. There's a good chance I'll land up doing it outside of SIMS in order to get a more user-friendly interface; but then, wouldn't we just be using SIMS as a slightly awkward interface for entering assessment data?

TruancyCall seems pretty good - I've seen SchoolComms in action (at Handsworth...) and that also seemed very effective. The reason we picked TC was the facility for phone calls as well as texts. If anyone else uses Exchange for internal email, I was going to make a report that adds emails based on name lookup rather than SMTP email - would anyone else have a use for this?

Is it me, or is this turning into a "we hate capita" forum??? I don't object to griping, and certainly I have my niggles with SIMS, but it's not all that constructive really, is it?

I think we should all keep on bumping it by complaining that it's still alive...

If you've got the database and DOCSTORAGE backed up, and can restore to a VM somewhere, you should be covered. Exporting reports now and again probably isn't a bad idea anyway...

It's probably going to be easier if your results are set up with resultsets... I'm only over in Worksop, so if you're still working on this late January (yes, busy till then!), I can probably sort something out if you want.

I think there are worse things to get upset about. Yes, Mike, you're strongly polarised in favour of SIMS, but it works for you! I've seen you in action and can attest to its effective use in your school, as well as your strong competence in using the software. A lot of posts on edugeek about SIMS are made by people who haven't been given the training they need to use the MIS fully, and as a result have run into problems. I personally feel that the opprobrium directed at SIMS and Capita is only partly dented by Sivadam's defence, and he should definitely continue to post in order to keep a balance! Really, SupportNet is a better place for SIMS help as there are more trained users there (and it's a closed forum, which sometimes helps) - but this forum here has the advantage of not being tied to one MIS, and also permits discussion of issues that no sane supplier would allow on their own website. I think people need to relax a bit - keep it up, Mike!

Apology? What for? (goes to find it now)

Same versions as us, Top_Cat - at least I know everything's working at our end then!

I did wonder why someone went the extra mile to do the harder implementation... It would be good to have both - maybe described as "Student's Teachers" and "Student's Teachers Today" or similar.

OK, where to start?... 1) First of all, the SQL you're using has the wrong syntax. Standard select queries normally look like this: SELECT field1, field2, field3, ... FROM table1 [AS alias1], table2 [AS alias2],... WHERE conditions...; Using "*" instead of the fieldlists will just return all columns from the query. If the table(s) you're selecting from has/have a lot of columns, this may not be such a good plan. Your query needs to read like this instead: SELECT base_group_id FROM sims.stud_reg_group; i.e. "SELECT field FROM database.table;", as opposed to "SELECT * FROM database.table.field;" which is not quite right! 2) Looking at the content of your post, it seems reasonable to assume that you're not entirely comfortable writing SQL queries - do you really want to mess with your school's data in this way, without knowing what the potential outcomes are? There are other mechanisms for getting this kind of data out of the system, notably the reporting mechanisms in SIMS, which will also export data as CSV/XML in order to let you process them with another program. I'd suggest, very strongly, that this might be a better way to do some of this! 3) I'd love to be proved wrong on this one, so if anyone can confirm otherwise I'd be delighted: as I understand it, unless you're a SIMS SQL Partner, Capita do not support direct access to the SQL database. That means that if there is a problem with your data, and there's even a whisper of suspicion that it may be your fault it's happened, you'll get charged a lot of $$$ to fix it. Also, (and I don't have the licence here), but "received wisdom" on the forum is that the SIMS licence specifically prohibits accessing the database. This includes read-only access - there are quite a lot of threads bemoaing this. There are some very valid reasons for this. First of all, if Capita change the database schema, or the /meanings/ of various field values, any code you write that accesses the database will cease to work. As the direct access isn't supported, that would mean you're on your own if a change from Capita broke your functionality. Also, looking at some of the patches Capita have run on our database, there's a certain amount of metadata in the database; i.e. not only can changing a field value change a head of house into a registration tutor, changing a value elsewhere can change where SIMS "looks" to find registration tutors. Or whatever - you get the idea! The patches that we've had also check the database schema number, and if the version is too old or too recent, then the patch won't work as expected. The same would apply to any code that you write to access the database direct. If there is a way to access the database with Capita's blessing, on a read-only basis, I'd love to know about it, but I suspect it's an sql-partner-or-nothing scenario! Hope some of this helps somewhere... Matt

I'm only seeing 3-5 teachers per student on this feature - our LA tells me the design is to show teachers that student has *today*, not all of their teachers. Is it working differently for you then? Which SIMS build and database build do you have there? Matt

I think I might be inclined to go the report route as well - the next feature in SIMS will only pick up teachers the student has *today*, so isn't so good for a round-robin type message. It sounds like this is how it's staying too. :-(

I'd imagine someone's done this now, but if anyone knows what format "works" for CMIS, lemme know and I'll make an access converter script. To be honest, the export format is very much improved now from FFT Live and it's pretty close to what many people would like as an import format, I should imagine.

You're calling Cells(...) without specifying which cells you want to select! Not tested, but I'd bet good money that's what's causing the error - specify the range that you want, and then hopefully it'll work.

Ask your LA or Capita support for the third-party reporting documentation - apparently that'll tell you how to do it.

I think the OP wanted SIMS to identify and select the teachers related to a child, rather than have to hunt for which ten teachers out of 120 teach a given student! There is a way to do this, although it isn't quite doing what I'd expect (might be our system, we're still looking here), which is the "Class Teacher" role selector in the search box. For some reason, it's only showing some of the teachers for a given student on our site at the moment. But it's good in principle!

I tried this option (we're on build 7.122), and it works for head of year/head of house/reg group tutor, but if you select the teachers option it just shows all staff, and doesn't filter the list down!

The best way to enter grades and validate them is either to enter them using the SIMS client, or to enter them using SLG. The same thing applies to Profiles for comments. All our grades and comments are entered using AM7 (I'm looking at using Profiles but we're trying to keep to a report-briefly-and-frequently model), and although the actual report generation takes place outside of SIMS, I rely heavily on the data validation mechanisms in SIMS to ensure that people enter meaningful stuff! There are a couple of staff who go the exported marksheet route, but we try to discourage it, as it tends to make life more awkward, and moves the burden of entering a valid grade away from the person entering the grades (teacher) to someone else (admin staff). There are ways to get data out of SIMS cleanly and efficiently; what I would say, though, is that it's hard to think of a situation where you wouldn't want staff to enter data directly into SIMS. If your reporting solution works, fair enough, stick with it: but it doesn't sound like it's perfect, and the whole issue of online reporting is disturbing. If the CSV exported needs manual editing before it can be used, this doesn't suggest that the online access will be all that rigidly secure! SLG looks good.

I seem to be missing something here! Many people keep on mentioning the difficulty of having to update all SIMS client workstations by hand each time there's an upgrade, but I've never seen this to be an issue. We use the SIMSPERM.BAT script here, and on running pulsar.exe (not SIMSLoad strangely), SIMS checks at startup to see if there's a new client and installs it if it does. SIMS *does* have its issues and limitations, but a need to update client machines doesn't seem to be one of them. Why do people complaining that it is?

I was thinking more in terms of having an aspect for each assessment focus (a numeric score, not the actual grade descriptor) and calculating the overall level from that. It seems the most popular method in APP software.

One way round this, and I know it doesn't always work, is to insist on a written description (in English, rather than in SIMS/computer-speak) of who needs to be able to see (and/or to edit) what. THEN set up the permissions based on it. You won't get away with refusing to change stuff afterwards, but it will usually allow you a bit of lead time for future changes ("It'll take a day to set that one up for you"). It's probably owrth doing this straight away - upgrades to this kind of thing generally transfer over the previous setup (otherwise no-one would be able to use SIMS after the upgrade!). Not having a team of admin people have to copy-type data all over the place, and correct the inevitable mistakes, wrong addresses, phone numbers, etc will be a major reduction in workload!

Don't worry about it - some of the other posts were sufficiently off the mark that I was starting to think it was anything goes in this one anyway!