Sylv3r

We've used this for a while now. Supposedly some kids struggle to read analog clocks....

We've lost a PC or two over the years with a VDG Generator.

We've had a full rewire this summer across the school so the servers were downed for a full day on two occasions. Both times they come back online fine, but there's always a heart in your mouth moment up until that last VM spins up !

We used to use SchoolCentre which was an online offering similar to BlueSky with the same complaints - clunky! We now just have folders with the necessary permissions setup on our staff drive for each member of staff. Both the reviewer and reviewee have access to their own folder plus the HT has access to them all and we just have word documents as blank proforma's initially which they complete. Probably took around an hour to an hour and a half initially to setup and any changes at the end of the academic year takes around 10 minutes. SchoolCentre was setting us back around £2k a year when we had it !

When we had it, I used to hide the webpart - that was self-hosted - at a guess. The hosted version may not allow you to do it.

We use Enviro Electronics too. They leave us a bin and we just fill it up as we go and give them a call to collect and leave a new empty bin.

Our staff pass the details / photos to us and we update facebook. We've got a cohort of sixth formers in Sri Lanka at the minute and a group of 50 Year 7's have just returned from France - worked well with minimum fuss. The facebook updates automatically appear as a widget on our website - so no reason for those parents without facebook to miss out.

We've gone down the Office365 pro plus route and haven't come across any SIMS issues up to now.

We go with either Trello or an excel document with a sheet for each school / working week for the secondary and I just colour code the cells depending on completed, work in progress etc. There's a column for the member of staff responsible, cost involved and hopefully the target completed date.

Generally someone is around the office / helpdesk unoffically from around 7:45 - 5:00. Officially it's 8:00 - 4:30 plus manned over the hour lunch break. I generally find that the pre school and post school time is spent proactively preparing for the next day, getting into classrooms without causing too much of an inconvenience during the day etc. We support 6 local primaries too, but they tend to work a shorter day so have very little tickets from them before 9:00 and after 3:00.

Another happy Libresoft customer here. They'll be a lot of schools no doubt reinstating their libraries - as the new Ofsted framework mentions reading quite a bit and will probably be a key focus moving forward.

We are a happy SchoolCOMMS user too.

We certainly haven't forced the staff to use their mobile phone, some of our senior staff when offered a school phone or device have declined the opportunity in the past as they didn't wish to carry two phones around with them and felt it was a waste of money to buy them an an iPAD / Laptop etc when they didn't really need one. Certainly, if a member of staff objected to using their own device (I think there's only 6 - 8 staff in total, we would just buy them the USB dongle.

Our staff who need the elevated access have used their personal phones barring two - who's nokia or whatever type of phone they had wasn't compatible so we had to buy them the USB dongle - I think they are around £17 each.

Are you a CC4 school or vanilla with RM Unify? If you are on CC4, RM have their own OneDrive mapper that may do the job for you (Doesn't work on Vanilla).

We trialled it for them about 12 months ago. Didn't have any issues on the small number of staff who used it. We were looking for a way to get ALL staff to complete their registers - some just didn't bother opening SIMS up because we logged all behaviour in ClassCharts. For some bizarre reason staff started completing their registers on time, so we just turned the ClassCharts attendance off to stop any confusion.

We are currently using CRB and our tills are coming upto 8 year old so will need to be replaced. We are therefore looking at other companies and their solutions at this time to test the market. We've not had any specific issues with CRB and the kit has been extremely reliable for us and we've never had an issue with support. It also integrates well with SchoolCOMMS - our parent engagement app and online payment system. The support contract costs are relatively high however. I have a quote from Live register and to replace our POS, software and revalv machine including installation, we are looking at a similar cost of our maintenance contract for the first 4 years on what appears to be similar to a lease agreement and then the maintenance cost halves from year 5. I've had a demo of Biostore today and the product looks on PAR to CRB, but seems to be more flexible in the things it can do with additional reports available. It integrates with SchoolCOMMS also as well as upto 250 other partners for various things such as door entry, print release, online payment systems etc. I don't have the cost through yet, so I am not sure how comparable they are.

Just missed out on these after buying 5 x E5450's last week. If anybody is looking for a decent spec laptop - I can highly recommend these based on the cost spec and condition - practically look brand new with plastic screen packaging the lot !

I wonder if they start sending the renewals through as a reminder after say 120 days rather than 30?

Our LA used to host NM meetings but they weren't particuarly well attended and there was a reqirement that you must have signed up to X, Y and Z, SLA's in order to attend - as and when schools got more autonomy to move away from the LA the meetings just stopped. I started a new group and at times we had 20+ members coming along, but due to time commitments and planning venue's, agenda's etc. I decided to give it up and agreed with the LA that they would once again start to host the meeting. It started back up again and numbers were healthy although it's now been a year or so since the last meeting - not sure what has happened. We now have a slack group, with various channels for the local NM's / Technicians and although it has 42 members there's probably a core 6 - 8 people who post reguarly (daily). It's been a great sounding board and has given people the opportunity to share ideas, best practice as well as have a moan ! It might be worth looking at setting up something similar in your area, then your not having to arrange something formal but still a place for the local NM's to hang out.

I kept popping in and out of the stream and things worked well for me. Only one thing to suggest, was the possibility of a roving mic for those in the audience asking questions, but the presenter relaying the message back for those who didn't hear worked well.

We moved our Sharepoint site over to Sharepoint as part of our O365 setup. To be honest it works better, because it's managed by Microsoft and I can setup and forget.

All 7 of our schools are happily using CPOMS.

We've had these lately and they appear to be now using the same area code that we have.

We've had fun and games these last few weeks with the IP's changing too. Other than this slight niggle, we love the product and have it setup in our 7 schools and like you offer to support parents, students or staff at home where applicable.