Iain.Faulkner

Just to echo, you are a total legend for this. Extremely irritating to come in this morning to find Sims not working for us. Don't get me started on Sims forcing us across to NextGen for certain modules, the system is a long way from being ready for proper use.

I think,could be wrong, that they removed it about 6/7 months ago. We'd hoped to deploy it as well. When speaking with classcharts, apparently it will return at some point.

We're hiring for a Senior ICT Technician. Wilmslow High School is a wonderful school and this is a great chance for an experienced Technician to make a step up in a very supportive environment. I'm starting here full time from next week, so you'll be working with me. If you have any questions about the role, please drop me a message. Senior ICT Technician, Cheshire East - Tes Jobs

Of course, drop me a message.

Fair point, I can understand why there could be concerns. They were all genuine reasons for leaving, it's just unfortunate timing that they all came at around the same time. The member of staff that this role is advertising for the replacement for left for a promotion to a Director of IT role, the Senior Technician also left for a promotion at another school.

Just for anyone that's looking for a new role in the new year. I was seconded out to Wilmslow High School, from my Trust role, in November when they lost three members of their IT Team. It's such a brilliant school, great staff an extremely supportive SLT with so much scope to put your stamp on the network in a very large school (2300 students). I think it's rare as well to find this type of role that is on the leadership team. It's a great opportunity for someone. Happy to answer any questions anyone may have, just drop me a message. Senior Leader: ICT & Network Operations, Wilmslow High School - Tes Jobs

Thank you for the suggestion, sadly we spoke to them a while back. They basically told us our kit was worthless and offered us about £1000 for the whole lot

Morning all, I've got a server room full of our old wireless network hardware following a recent connect the classroom project. Rough idea of what we've got - 1 x Cisco 8500 x-Series Wireless Controller 88 x Cisco AIR-CAP2702I-E Access Points 2 x Cisco Catalyst 4500 X-Series Fibre switches – Both 16 port Plus some Cisco Catalyst 2960 X-Series 48 Port PoE All with associated fiber modules and DAC cables where appropriate. It seems such a shame to just dispose of it all as WEEE wastage. Does anyone know of anywhere that might offer us something for them? Thanks everyone

Definitely add the clause about stickers!! We did this project over the last few years and some of them are terrible for stickers!

Yeh we've got schools desperate for a refresh. One rural primary school, with only 60 students, and one secondary school desperate for a refresh. But because we're in "leafy" cheshire/derbyshire these schools are always overlooked.

Thank you for that, I'm currently doing the online payment training course.

Morning all, We moved our Trust across to Bromcom mid way through last year, I will be brutally honest and say that it hasn't been a popular move for a multitude of reasons not all of which are Bromcom's fault. We're looking to make moves to bring a few more of our services into Bromcom and I was hoping to speak with other Schools/Trusts about how they have found using Bromcom for payments (replacing ParentPay), Trips (to replace Evolve), Data Analysis (to replace 4Matrix/Sisra) and lunch ordering for Primary Schools (to replace Cypad). Just looking to see how you find it, is it a working solution that will replace these third party apps, have you had any issues with the initial setup and ongoing usage etc and any advice on how best we roll these out. Thank you all

We've been using Senso for a few years, and I would say that this is a very accurate description of our experience with Senso as a product and their support team.

Also happy to have a chat, just drop me a PM

I'd second this about ParentPay. They were truly dreadful with us, I think for one of our Primary schools it was nearly 12 weeks before they managed to do everything that was needed.

We've done it at two different times. We did three primary schools at May half term, no issues at all, went incredibly smoothly. Then two secondary schools for a September launch......awful. Incredibly stressful. I think though the best piece of advice I would give you is spend days/weeks testing in your demo environment, make sure roles/permissions are setup exactly how you want them (this is where our two secondary schools really went wrong with this) and staff can do everything that they need to be able to do on day one. Then training, training, training. Ensure the schools understand that they can't do everything in Bromcom in the same way that they did it in Sims/Classcharts (or whatever it is you're moving from). It's different, but that doesn't make it bad. Looking back, I'm still glad we did it. As @Synkrox says, short term pain is well worth the long term game.

We're purchasing directly through Freshworks. We currently purchase 7 agents on the growth plan.

I'm kind of pinning my hopes on V2 being better as well. Think we're looking at doing some work on it at February half term. I have regular requests demanding we move back to Impero as quickly as possible. To be honest though, it's been hard to defend Senso as for classroom management it hasn't been reliable enough.

Just to add, we've also had Every as well (I think technically we're still licensed for it), we've never got on with this either. I can't really tell you why as I know very little about it.

We use Smartlog, but I wouldn't recommend it for reasons similar to those given for not choosing Parago. I'd love to find something that does this really well.

We're in the same position across our five schools. Although we're looking at using Microsoft 365 as our Primary cloud solution, we're not intending to get rid of Google Classroom, however, we want to make it authenticate using google. Reasons for keeping google ae for Google Classroom and also Chromebooks as they're such good devices and pretty cheap. But a bit like you, we have lots of paid for things in Microsoft (including 365 backups and conditional access MFA), and we use it for email, which is why we've gone with it as our preferred solution.

We did it over the summer and I wish we hadn't. Staff did some training prior to the summer break and promptly forgot it all. Nothing wrong with the process from Bromcom though. Staff at our schools didn't engage as fully as they should and as a result the school processes weren't in place and permissions were incorrect for staff. It's taken us months of work to get to a usable point. They kept telling us they were doing the training and it just wasn't the case.

Just giving this a bump, closing date is 9am on Thursday 5th December.

Wish I'd known this last week

We've also just bought into Freshdesk, paying in GBP by invoice. The contact I spoke with was [email protected]