This is my first post, and I feel bad that it's such a bitchy one, but what can you do? I trotted over after someone on the Serco "forums" mentioned this place, and you look like a good bunch so far.
Anyway, my problems with Facility. We were one of the test cases, installing the upgrade as soon as it was released (yeah, I know, I should know better) and so being one of the first to report the various problems, and the frustrating thing for me is that, despite emailing a detailed technical analysis of what's going wrong and why it's not my fault, the problem list on their website doesn't even list our problems!
The main trouble here is with reporting. We're an independent school, but we use Hebron for the financial side of things and all the exam preparation work was done before the upgrade, so it's just the applicants that's causing us trouble. Of course, now is the only time of the year we deal with applicants, so that trouble's big. I know that the Applicant system's never worked properly, but over the years we've evolved tricks and procedures to get around the problems, and it still seems to work fine. Within Facility, that is - as soon as we try to get data out with a report (which we use as checklists and, most importantly, every letter sent to parents regarding the success or otherwise of their little darlings) then none of the information comes out.
There was the same trouble with assessment OMR sheets - the right number of rows printed, but I can only tell because the comma between the first and surnames is printed; the names themselves aren't. That renders the sheets useless, but it's not much of a problem because we can enter results through the ePortal.
There was other stuff too - Daily absence reports were printing every absence a girl had ever had (so a report for about 40 girls ran to about 300 pages), there were some other attendance reports, and more things that were so quick to fix I can't even remember them.
We've had emails coming in from Serco apologising, including the one someone else mentioned offering a reporting course, but nothing that makes me happy. Except the line "We are finalising a new issue of the software which will undergo rigorous testing before being made available to schools" - there's a tacit confession that they didn't bother testing the first release if there ever was one.
With all these problems I've been reduced to using Word mailmerges from an Access database that's linked to the SQL server. It's not pretty, and it's taking up far too much of my time to work around the problems, but it's getting the job done.
If you're interested, I installed the latest build on my laptop with an offline copy of the database in SQL Server 2005 Express and logged all the queries that the application made. The verdict - it's asking for, and getting, all the right information. The problem in this case is presumably the filtering system, and my guess is it's a simple logic error in the new code. I've offered to fix it (the suggestion's been made before, too) but they won't release the source code.
One good thing's come of this - I'm much more familiar now with that dogs dinner of a database they use but refuse to document...
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Hmm, my first post turned into a rant. I'm not always like this, honestly...
