Linfit

We moved from SIMS to Bromcom at Feb half term. We picked this as the quietest period - wanted to avoid xmas as 3rd party support not available, and Sept as too much else going on - and it means all the training has to be before Summer holidays and then there is a long gap before implementation. No major census due and mock exams done. We did exam entries in SIMS as we knew these would carry through, but the lead time was enough for the EO to manage the summer exams in Bromcom with support from me. The key is in the prep - if your data is in a good state the transition is easier. I spent the whole of the Autumn term working on this (and training, especially for key players - exams, attendance etc). Had no major issues in the end.

In terms of exam support, as opposed to support in the classroom for learning, you cannot provide any provision really. The exam boards view has always been that exams must be done in English, and if a candidates language skills do not allow them to access the exam or course materials, then they should not be entered for the examination. Its surprising how many teachers are not aware of this, and in my past life as an EO I would get questions every so often which were basically "How do we arrange to get the papers translated" and surprise when the answer was "You can't".

If its in the Examin folder then SIMS should be able to see it and you can make entries using it - you need to create an "entry" for every student you want to get a result for, and then submit this to the board via A2C. Its a trick to ensure the results are processed like the GCSE results on results day, where they will appear as an additional results download file. You do not have to do this - if you only have a few BTEC learners certificating, you can just look up the results on the exam board secure site on results day and manually add them to SIMS.

The 7B file is not a result file - its a basedata file which is used to register with Pearson that you want the results for the BTEC's to be sent to you in a results file on results day. Its a weird system which goes back to the early days of BTEC and should have been updated by now but there we are. Full instructions are Here: 7B results file.

Are you building a block ? Looks like you have allocated CB to more lessons than will fit in the block (ie: there are 5 lessons in the block but CB has ended up allocated to 6 or more).

I went through this process exactly two years ago. Its time consuming - I spent a lot of time between Sept and Jan cleaning and tidying SIMS in between doing the Bromcom training. Its going to be difficult it you are trying to fit it into other jobs. I had been put in charge of the migration so it was essentially my full time role at the time, so do-able. I used to purge the over 25's regularly so we did not have too many old records to start with. Main issue with contacts is duplicates - same person but recorded twice in the system as they have been re-entered rather than an existing contact attached. Various ways of dealing with this, including producing a list of all contacts and tracking down the ones with the same names and details and confirming they are the same - one can then be detached from a child and the remaining one attached instead, they can then be deleted using unlinked contacts. This is a very slow process. Address tidy and merge is worth doing - I recall it took some time but not hours - best done out of hours though. Like all these routines, its worth doing multiple times. The other big issue for us was data stored in the wrong fields in the contact info or not flagged correctly. For example, many instances of Grandma's phone number being entered as a note on the phone number for a parent. Bromcom doesn't like this, they need to be either removed it not relevant or put in as a separate contact. The other issue we had which caused us grief was telephone numbers of contacts not being flagged as mobiles. Unless they are flagged correctly, when they go through to Bromcom they will not be flagged as a mobile number and the Bromcom comms system, which is very good, will not work properly. We were using Edulink for comms previously and this was more forgiving in this respect. As to documents, have a long think about what actually needs migrating. Nothing comes through automatically and although there are tools which will pull all attached documents from the document server we decided to go for the nuclear option and took nothing out of the doc server. We then uploaded clean new versions of things like medical records and SEN info - which had the added advantage of ensuring that anything that was uploaded was the latest version of everything. And yes, Bromcom allows you to flag SEN Medical and other docs in specific categories in the pupil profile. We had access to the SIMS server and could have pulled assessment reports if required, but in the two years since we have never had a need to do so.

True but one of the reasons it hasn't changed much is because it was very very good. - It was not oringinally a Capita or a SIMS product. I have timetabled for 20+ years and not yet found a problem I couldn't solve with it. Timetabler is close, but still not as good, and the new Bromcom timetable software is coming on very quickly, but still not up to the sophistication of Nova. You also have to consider that the timetabling is not a once a year process - timetables change constantly through the year, sometimes quite fundamentally, and Nova is still the best at managing maintenance data sets. The issue isn't the quality of the software but the outrageous price ESS want to charge for it thinking that have schools that use it over a barrel.

We did this two years ago and chose Feb half term. Easter is definitely better than summer. If you get something wring that screws up the first day of term in Sept its going to be much harder to recover from than dealing with it in the summer term. It also gives you time to sort out issues with timetable transfer, get your head around curriculum management and gives your data manager time to sort out assessment and things and the summer to refine it. The only issue is exams - if you have done entries in SIMS they will carry over no problem, but not sure about seating plans - we had the entries in SIMS but managed everything after entry deadline in Bromcom. One of the reasons we picked the half term.

And here we go again...... "Slow response times from the MIS We are again seeing slow response times from the MIS pages. Our team is working on this as a priority. We would like to apologise for the inconvenience this is causing. Created at Jul 18 2024, 14:05 BST" Everyone trying to get reports out at the end of term no doubt. Getting very much beyond a joke now, this is the third major slowdown this week.

We moved from SIMS to Bromcom 18 months ago. Transition was well-handled, we did it over a Feb half term but with a lead in going back to the pervious Sept, so we had plenty of time to prepare. Training was good. (I did it all, a bit of a marathon !) Most of our issues were with poor data in our SIMS database, nothing to do with Bromcom as such. We have found Assessment, Behaviour and Attendance to be very good, our attendance officer is very happy with it. As an ex-exams officer I like the Exams module, and the communications aspect is excellent. The parent app MCAS is OK and they have recently made it easier to on-roll new contacts. There are some excellent automation features, and the new Options and Timetable modules look pretty good. Some areas need work - the seating plans are rudimentary if you are used to classcharts or Edulink, and the student app is poor. Cover needs some work and is less functional than the SIMS version - for example it won't quickly produce a paper class register for all the classes of a supply teacher for the day. Room booking is problematic unless you have a person dedicated to running it. Main issues for us have been long response times for tickets, the two major outages they have had since Xmas, one of which was over two days, and the problems they have had with reporting - they are essentially trying to re-write the entire reporting sub-system used when you build your own reports and they have had a lot of problems with poorly tested updates going back to this time last year. Overall, I am glad we changed, and I still think we made the correct choice. I think a lot of the issues with support and things breaking are down to them expanding very fast and not being able to keep up, but they do need to get on top of this now.

We currently user Nova-T with Bromcom and have no issues. Import is slightly more long-winded but works OK. I don't know about Nova and Arbor. We looked at Timetabler but the workflows and ways of doing things are very different to Nova and its a big, but not insurmountable effort to change - I can understand why someone would not want to, but if they have been timetabling for a while its not that bad. Also worth bearing in mind that Bromcom have done a lot of development this year on their new web based timetabling package and some schools have used this even though its technically only just in the release phase and they have only just started running training. It looks OK: different to Nova and Timetabler of course but nearer to Nova I think in terms of workflow and much better than their old e-timetabler. Next year we are going to use this and ditch Nova as that's when our current SIMS contract expires and we don't want to pay the licence fee which is excessive in my view for one piece of software.

Just had a further update: Known Issue - Bromcom MIS Performance - 20/05/2024 - Update Good morning, Apologies for the ongoing impact that you are experiencing with Bromcom MIS. Our engineers have opened a critical incident case with our cloud services hosting provider and are currently investigating why we have experienced a failure in our systems this morning. Together with the hosting provider, we are working as quickly as possible to restore the service. Once resolved and we understand why this happened, a root cause analysis (RCA) will be provided. Thanks Ours is working now but response is slow = but we have been able to to get cover sorted and start doing registers.

Agree - focus on the basic areas, especially contacts. We had a lot of legacy stuff where the contact information had not recorded consistently - so for example, the Grandma's phone number recorded as a note in the phone number of a parent rather than as a separate contact, or contact being recorded as "Nan" with no actual name. We also had contacts not correctly flagged as PR, or requiring correspondence, phones not flagged as Mobiles, stuff like that. We found issues because having these correct is really important for the built in comms in Bromcom to work properly. Because we didn't use SIMS for comms we didn't really appreciate how inconsistent our contact data was, a lot of it being inherited crud from primary CTF files. Personally, I took the opportunity to clean up things like the Staff list and deleted a lot of staff who had left years ago - needed a special DB patch for this which I got from our support unit. We also made a deliberate decision to not migrate any attached documents. We exported them out but only re-imported SEN passports and some medical stuff, the majority, which were old termly reports, we did not migrate. I did dump out a load of Summary marksheets so that we had an assessment history for our current students. We set up a new assessment framework in Bromcom but were then able to pull in the last years data relatively easily

I think most centres have ended up doing that. EO's are already under pressure as the time allowed for them to download all the various electronic copies in the morning has been shortened, and on top of that the Exam Boards web sites are not always working correctly, files not where they should be etc. There have also been a lot of issues with MFA and such not working correctly - all down to last minute poorly tested changes at the exam board end. Its just one more thing they don't need at what is already a stressful time, especially when they don't realise the issue until the exam has started and the hands start going up.

Its AQA - caused issues in loads of centres. Not just Claro read. AQA will have to sort it. Big Science exam tomorrow which will be impossible unless its sorted.

That's correct. When we became an Academy I remember this being flagged up by our support unit. We were using SIMS then and they ran a patch or script that they had access to which reset the start dates to avoid this, so our May census went through OK. Might be best contacting whoever the school gets their SIMS support from.

I would very much agree with what has been said above. Exams are very difficult and your Exams Officer will be under a great deal of pressure and will have a lot of people piling in and changing things at the last minute that your are not aware of - I know as I used to be an exams officer. They are not being awkward for the sake of it, but they have JCQ rules that must be followed and the consequences for them can be severe if there are issues. With my IT manager hat on, during exam time exams come at the top of the list. There was always one person in the team just assigned to the exam rooms for the whole 5 weeks and it took priority over everything else - it has to. Its important that the Exams Officer and the IT Manager have a good working relationship, and if there is antagonism there will be problems. I think both sides need to sit down and spend some time discussing why things are the way they are and what can be done to improve and streamline things, and maybe get a better understanding of how each operates and what is possible.

This is really best practice. We were always told to start academic year on 1st Sept regardless. Its distinct from term dates, which can be any start date within that year. Don't use SIMS anymore but in that situation I would have either started term on the 3rd, or on the 2nd with 2nd marked as inset and students need not attend.

Yes, they do match up, that's just historical as I re-did the AD OU's and groups when I first set up our Google tenancy a long time ago and we wanted everything to mirror as much as possible.

We use Salamander with Bromcom to sync everything up, works fine, no issues. We also use Google Directory Dync and don't use the Built in Bromcom Sync tool. To be fair, that may be all you need for the Google side, our main reason for having Salamander is AD provisioning.

The print quality is adequate - you need to see samples in hand I think to judge if its OK for you. We wouldn't use it for presentation quality stuff or anything that was needed to last long term, but most printing in schools is effectively disposable and its fine for long runs of exam papers and such. Its not newsprint - it doesn't come off in your hands. Our repro person uses it for long runs of booklets for use in class and doesn't have any issues. You do get bleed-through if printing colour on both sides to a certain degree. Advantage for big print runs though is that they are very fast.

Would definitely look at RISO - our five year old ones have just been like for like replaced and they have been solid as a rock. They are in public spaces, get hammered and just carry on going. Few calls outs and when we have the engineers are quick and effective. Very cheap to run as well. Its inkjet so not super good quality, but perfectly OK for day to day. Integrate well with papercut and they set it all up for you, we use them with our Net2 keyfobs. One of the best decisions we made to get them.

I doubt there is any choice. Its like Scotland, these things are determined at a national level and you get what you get. Simplifies a lot of things, not least for people moving between schools, but can result in stagnation and lack of innovation - the Scottish MIS is old, bespoke to them and its replacement is years behind schedule.

Yep, as yesterday, unusable at the moment, just at the end of morning reg. They really need to sort this - it seems to happen at the start of every term, and after the issues with reporting and registers at the end of last term where poorly tested updates broke things they are not doing themselves any favours at all.

Assuming a standard install, write permissions will be needed by the following users on the following folders: Timetabler – S:\SIMS\SNOVA Exams Officer – S:\SIMS\EXAMS Anyone using Options – S:\SIMS\OPTIONS Anyone using Attendance letter templates – S:\SIMS\Attend Anyone processing CTF’s and ATF’s – S:\SIMS\STAR anything else can be read and most users fodon't need the mapped S drive anyway.