resin1

ok - was on same wavelength then. Cheers!

Hmmm - now I'm not sure if you were actually being sarcastic as I thought or referring to something real where you are in the know. If the latter - are you able to disclose what you are alluding to? :-)

As in a specific day, very early in April?? ;-)

Doubt that is the case, otherwise why would they acquire Synetrix and so have OPENHIVE under their umbrella? Tend to agree with the first point too - they should knuckle down and just concentrate on making some very sexy looking web-parts or allow you to make them sexy, rather than the somewhat dated look that SLG has always had.

Here here! However, I would say - just leave it and minimise the opportunity for come back. Personally I find these entirely unnecessary exchanges the most tiresome aspect of reading this forum :-(

100% spot on localzuk! Additionally, one only needs to look at fine 3rd party tools such as Stars4Schools & 4Matrix (and their take-up) to see that there are areas, such as the handling of Assessment data, where the MIS' capability and user interfaces are well off where the user market needs them to be.

Keep in mind that TASC Insight is for internal hosting only, so depends if thats an important issue for you. We are not a user, but from what I have seen and heard from them, it makes SLG look silly in terms of how straightforward, well presented and usable it is, and a similarly silly price in comparison. The revamp of the user interface I saw at BETT just the other week is really nice too. Griff - probably unfair to ask, but are you saying your place bought in to Bromcom MCAS and have been unable to get it working with your SIMS data in a year? Can't be down to their support surely - which is second to none usually.

Ah - nows that interesting. Does this mean that exported marksheets from AM7 will no longer be type XML Spreadsheet 2003 and templates for individual reports will no longer be limited to pre - 2007 formatting restrictions? Sorry to those who are still on Office 2003, but if the above is correct, that's wonderful news as far as I'm concerned :-)

Right Vik - I realised afterwards that was the wrong terminology - like you I would have really benefited simply from a White Paper or some document that outlined the general concept and structure - i..e the foundations on which all the good coding was going to be done and the stuff that would be unlikely to change by release. Just would have been really useful to know thats all.

At the end of the day, quibbles about when something completely new like this should have or will arrive, are "by the by", as this is such a fundamentally useful new tool and finally something that "looks" state of the art in SIMS that we should all be overjoyed. But I would echo what Vik says, having been myself at the last two BETT's. Either something changed or they were simply economical with the truth - as they did indeed imply people would be able to get hands-on later that year (I think even Oct/Nov was touted) - they just didn't make it clear that would be to a very limited set of tester's (and yes I applied for that program but of course failed to get on it) and it would be at least another 6 months before general release. Fair-do's, they then did offer a later open access test if you had a seperate test SIMS installation (which we don't and were not about to spend time setting up). My frustration was that, even after repeated attempts, I was not able to get access to early documentation on this tool - specifically to understand better the concept for hooking up to AM7 elements, which may have influenced my thinking on enhancements I was planning to make to our assessment structure during latter part of 2010. As such, I've held off doing so and will wait until we get it in before deciding what to add to make Discover as valuable a tool internally as it has the potential to be. And yes - waiting and waiting for dynamic groups, so hallelujah when they are accessible! My main worry though, which I'm hoping will fade as they find ways to improve the situation, is this spec requirement. Last thing I would want is to know we have a great tool (and clap hands to Capita for deciding to make it part of the maintenance update packaging!), yet to then find that there are only one or two users with the right equipment on which it runs effectively enough for it to be usable. Again - concerns may be unfounded - we'll have to wait and see.

I'm a bit confused. I thought you refered to the updated version of the exams.exe and that it was a result of using that, that you have bad data. That KB I think refers to the original issue with the exams result files and the updated exams.exe was intended to address that original issue? Or am I missing something. Your original post worried me as we have used that revised module and loaded in our unit results yesterday, and all appear to have gone in fine so we have not spent any further time checking. We did not do any manual entry - just waited for the fix. Sorry - just read your latest post!! Ok so the rushed manual entry wasn't valid and the results re-loaded with the new module have not left a clean situation. ok - I'm relieved but sorry for you.

I agree Vik - it does seems a shame that SIMS does not have such a facility. Surely if they put in the constraint that files have to be named along the same lines as the way they get named if you export to disk from AM Individual Report i.e. "surname-forename-adno-filename" then it surely wouldnt be too difficult to have a browser/uploader that link attached the documents to the right student?? I had a brief demo of Cohesion's RECORDLINKwriter a year or so back and thought that might do what I have just described, but at the time they also said no. Not sure if that has changed.

Sounds really odd Mike. I've used the approach you are trying without issue for the last couple of years, countless times, and provided when you browse to select the files to print, they are being displayed in alphabetical sort order in the Windows browser, there surely shouldn't be anything to prevent that being the way they are worked through, should it? I simply drag to select all files in a folder, and if they are generated reports from SIMS named in the conventional way with Surname-Forename-etc-etc, they are normally displayed in Surname sort order and print exactly the same way. Does the same thing happen for a random group of Word documents saved as .xml that haven't been created from SIMS?

Ah - well spotted Vik. Never tried the reverse, but the only problem probably would be that the lookup function acts like a vlookup(x,x,x,FALSE) rather than a TRUE which is what would be better for a grade boundary lookup. I expect you would have to enter every single value to map to each grade which would be a bit of a pain. I dont know if there is a limit of number of rows in the lookup builder, but assuming thats not an issue, then its still a quick job, since you can create the table in Excel and simply copy/paste into the lookup builder in SIMS.

Have a look at topic 25942 on SupportNet forum. Works fine exploiting the lookup formula. I have some templates that have some formulas using values of the gradeset and some using values from a lookup, off the same grade aspect.

Hi, Would be interested in any feedback from users with any commercial learning platform that has a link to SIMS. I'm not looking for "which is best" as far as an LP is concerned, so will make that clear immeadiately. What I am interested in, is the auto-links they provide to extract data from SIMS to make it available on the LP server - specifically, how they go about taking staff record data from the Personnel module, simply to provision staff user accounts. Do they require a SIMS "dummy" user account to be established, and what role permissions do they demand on that SIMS account in order to simply facilitate the staff user accounts (login/password) on the LP? I'm not going to get into the "why am I asking" cycle - I'm simply interested in the techniques vendors are providing or dictating on the SIMS end user establishments. And no - I have no affiliation to any vendor, I am an end user myself. Thanks to anyone that takes the time to reply.

Stars4Schools looks interesting conceptually, although is pretty new and probably needs some work on the presentation front - not sure how rich you can make their report templates. Upside is built in performance analysis for key stage stuff & slice/dice capability. Downside I assume is yet another seperate data repository i.e. I think it links into MIS to pull data but not sure it allows you to write any of the report/assessment data back in.

Vik - am 99% certain you can only have it hosted by them as sidney says, irrespective of whether you are having it hook back in to their platform or SIMS at your site. If you discover otherwise I'd love to hear, although its a mute point since we don't have any money to spend on it this year :-(

ok - your info is more current than mine then, and sounds promising. Clearly they are aiming to do what they should do with it!

Would be interested in your source in making that statement Banjo. If you are referring to Discover, then the line I had received from an AM at Capita and from direct dialogue with the Product Manager, is that this offering is NOT a replacement to PA, but will offer some higher level (and hopefully more intutitive and usable) facility for doing, for example, progress summaries for things like 5+ A*-C etc. They are not revamping SIMS AM or PA to do that. Unfortunately thats as much knowledge as I have - I had hoped by now that we would see a far more detailed description of what it will offer. If Phil Neal is able to offer anything, that would be useful to me and others I'm sure :-)

The above comments made me smile - especially Vik's - nice one. Certainly dont see the need to defend my self, but I'll just say that any vendor worth their salt should be constantly reviewing and researching to see what other vendors or complimentary solutions are up to, in order to either stay one step ahead of the competition or try to at least deliver something that is competitive. Anything stated earlier could be gleaned within a few minutes perusal of their web-sites, which I'm sure, Kozan's marketing or product management colleagues would hit sooner or later if he didn't himself. To me they were just examples of what users might demand. Heaven forbid that one vendor might be influenced by another commercial offering

ok Kozan - quickly ;-) yes - visual, visual visual what I mean by that statement, is that I'd want to be able to set-up a progress tracking system where for example, I say for this subject we need to collect predicted grades that are full GCSE (A*, A, B, C etc) and I am able to chose an element that allows those types of grades to be input and within the system the element is classed as "1 whole GCSE" or in other words 20% contribution to Level 2 performance measure threshold (5+ A*-C) and that a A* is worth 58 QCA points. Similarly, I could assign a GCSE grade collection element for a GCSE short course, and the system would know it is 1/2 a GCSE/10% contribution/A*=29 etc. Or for an OCR National Level 2 Certificate, I could collect Pass/Merit/Distinction and it would know these are 4 GCSE/80% contribution/Distinction=220 points etc. see Home Page - National Database of Accredited Qualifications if you are not familiar with all that stuff (search for a qualification and look at its performance measures). Although I haven't used either of the those systems I mentioned, I believe what they provide is a mechanism to map subject name/raw grade data collected via MIS or other, to an internal qualification database that then means they can analyse that raw data, present it meaningfully and allow drill down by users for decision making, in a context within which those users are being judged by external parties. Although I'm sure there will be a place in the market for them for some time to come and I'm not wishing them out of business (apologies if any of their reps look in here) but it would seem to me that an MIS should be able to offer something for assessment/progress monitoring that is designed and fit for the purpose(s) of a large number of users out there, rather than delivering something that is generic and may allow all to do something, but doesnt really fit a specific purpose.

Hopefully you will get a lot of input Kozan - I'd add more if i had the time, but as a quick response: from a secondary school perspective, if the module you developed would support the type of usability and presentation being offered currently by external commercial solutions such as 4Matrix and Sisra Online, to review current progress as well as final results data, then you would win over school leadership teams no problem whatsoever! By implication, at KS4 this means the assessment module should allow users to define means of recording grades against elements that have their (DCSF) performance measure contributions built in, so that the analysis part of the system can do all the hard work for the user, and allow the level of top level decision making for intervention etc that the above examples are currently providing. I have always felt that the MIS providers should be delivering this now, but I'm not sure any of them get anywhere close - if you look at it from the point of view of the amount of work and skills required to set-up analysis and then the user interfaces provided to exploit the data. Monitoring progress at KS4 is a good example I feel - it simply shouldn't be necessary to have to fashion a recording mechanism with an MIS, build in intelligence by using whatever formula mechanism to summarise key criteria by (by which schools are judged), and then fashion a whole host of different "views" of that data to provide a way for decisions to be made from it. Catering for all possible types of qualifications that schools may be delivering is a big ask, but I don't see it as an unreasonable expectation from an MIS system, when there are MIS systems out there that support this level of "intelligent" analysis for summer exam results. Hope that helps.

In terms of the OP request - will always depend on your local priorities/restrictions in terms of network setup/security concerns etc and whether you want something that just works straight off or something you have full control over and can tailor till the cows come in, but... in terms of solutions that will talk live into SIMS, if you want to host something in-house, I agree with mortstar - Insight seems a really nice simple implementation that looks like it will pretty well work straight out of the box and has (to me) one especially nice feature that "they say" allows the Word .xml report documents from the DocServer (Individual or Profiles) to be displayed as html on the fly. Looks like they only support in-house approach though. Big plus - its as "cheap as chips" compared to other solutions! If you want remotely hosted and maintained, Bromcom's MyChildAtSchool also have a live link to SIMS and puts SLG to shame in terms of how well the data is presented IMHO. These are personal impressions based on extended demonstration or hands-on to demo systems, not a live user, so take with a pinch of salt and make your own enquiries and judgements. Other systems are out there for "on-line reporting" but most I think are tied in to a vendors learning platform/VLE and I'm not sure whether any can be used in isolation.

Sadly this interesting discussion appears to have got pulled, as a result of it being initiated by or on behalf of Bromcom. One of the last posts was I think by a "Mike" from a Kent school. If you see this Mike, could you PM me. I think you implied you were looking to do an SLG v Webfolder consideration, which is what I anticipate starting shortly. I'd be interested to perhaps share contact details and compare notes! Cheers.