Linfit

You upgrade the server side and this dumps upgrades for the invigilator console and the clients on the server. The invigilator console and the clients will pick up the update from the server the first time they are run and upgrade themselves. This process worked OK for us this time.

The upgrade is available. For those people struggling to find it, the link for it is on page 10 of the pdf of the installation guide which is on the Onscreen testing for next generation BTEC Firsts page of the website. Link to pdf is http://www.edexcel.com/iwantto/Documents/Pearson%20Onscreen%20Platform%20LAN%20Indepth%20Guide.pdf I had to ring them to find this out. I did point out that perhaps putting the link and the announcement of a new version in a more obvious place on the website might be a good idea but that doesn't seem to have occurred to them. Much of the other documentation on the web site relates to the old version and if you read it to check which version number is current its still showing the old version as up to date, which it isn't. We did manage to do a test last Friday for 20 BTEC Sport students with only one issue though - which is amazing for us. Oh, and the installation guide is well worth a read - note the requirement for the local time to be overruled, which must be a joy for overseas centres using a proper network.

Its not so much the dates in Nova as the dates specified when the timetable was transferred. If a lesson did not exist on the timetable on 1st Sept the only way to make it exist is to re-export the timetable from Nova with a start date of 1st Sept. As @Shaner88 says though, this is not at all recommended, as there may have been other timetable changes which you may not wish to backdate, and you could end up causing all sorts of other issues with group memberships and lesson attendance if you use lesson monitor. A thought occurs though - did your timetable apply from the 1st Sept for anything. This may be the first day of the academic year, but the timetable may only have been applied at all from a later date, if for example, there were training days at the start of the year.

The lookup tables can be configured from Tools>Lookups>Maintain If you find Medical Condition in the list you can add new ones, make old ones inactive etc and print them out. Be careful adding new ones though as if they are ever used you can never delete them, just make them inactive, which means they cannot be seen in the dropdown but remain in the historical records.

@bossman makes a very important point - I try and enforce the rule here (try being the operative word) that certain sections of SIMS are maintained by only one person. If multiple people are changing the same data it can get very confusing, and causes no end of problems with things like census returns. With something like this, one member of staff should be responsible for updating that panel, and all updates fed through them.

If they need to be able to edit panel 7. Medical, then they need to be in an appropriate user group. The Class Teacher group has permissions to view this panel but not edit. There are a number of groups that can edit this panel, but Administration Assistant would do it. Assuming you have SIMS System Manager permissions, go to Focus>System Manager>Manage Users. Search for the user who needs to do the editing, and then in Panel 3 Groups, click Add. Find the Admin assistant group from the browser and select it. Done. They will need to log out and then back in to SIMS to see the changes.

We configurator installed on a MacBook air and I had exactly the same issue last week - download eventually timed out after several hours. I ended up taking the MacBook home and doing it there - took a few minutes. We do have issues with App store and some updates on the Apple server failing sometimes and then at other times they work fine. I suspect we have issues with our web proxy/wifi config that messes up Apple kit phoning home sometimes - Apple stuff really does not like non-vanilla networks. (And by that I mean anything with a proper firewall, web proxy and filter, VLANS, etc etc

Deleting registration groups can be problematic as it causes problems with historical data. Its really only an issue in large schools where data like attendance is tracked by reg group over long time periods and group memberships at certain dates are used for other purposes, like reporting to parents. There is no problem having an empty registration group so you could just leave it. Having said that, in a nursery school its likely not that critical, and especially if the group has only existed since the start of Sept, you should be able to delete it without any issues.

Location: Rochdale Number of Pupils on Roll: 1000 Do you offer support to schools in pyramid: Not currently What support do you buy in?: SIMS only Scale of Network: 1150 users, 750 end user devices, 30+servers, physical and virtual, Managed Wifi, IP telephony, CCTV, Building Management, Remote Access VDI's, everything with a plug... No of IT Support Staff: 1 IT Manager (only part time hands on IT and mainly SIMS and realted stuff) 1 Network Manager, 1 Full time tech, 1 part time (50%) tech.

Working in garden yesterday afternoon and hear the distinctive noise from over the moors - look up to see two spitfires in loose formation flying over, across the valley, over Blackstone Edge and off towards Derbyshire. Awesome. Half an hour later, that thrumming noise again, and bugger me - TWO Lancs, right over my house, flying in formation maybe 200 m apart, straight over, again over the ridge of the Pennines: presumably on their way from Southport to Derwent. Astonishing - absolutely made my summer. I was standing there on the lawn for a good five minutes after they had gone just stunned that I'd seen them.

There is a routine in SIMS similar to the Selection timetable option in Nova-T. Its in Reports>Timetables>Selection Timetables This will allow you to pick up teachers of a subject or group of subjects and then play with the formatting. Its worth experimenting with the layout options screen in there - its a little non-intuitive but once you work it out you can save layouts and use them over again.

We are in a similar situation. We are going to ditch the Parent Portal this summer and move over to TASC Insight as the frog parent portal is too clunky to maintain and too limited. As for Frog itself, I am seriously wondering if we actually need to replace it. Is a VLE actually needed these days ? Were they ever ? YMMV, but in our case I am not sure. I am certainly not going to move to whatever the new frog is called this week, and might not replace the old one with anything.

Interesting. We bought this years ago when it was an installable bit of software, one-off payment. Last month we had an invoice from them - payment for access to on-line resources. We have had no contact with them for several years, never visit their stand - I wondered at the time if they had sent a similar invoice out to any school that had ever bought the product and how many might pay it without checking: fortunately we have a very suspicious (and therefore very effective) finance team, who queried it with me. They have now gone on the list of never deal with ever companies.

If you have not already done so get yourself a Capita Supportnet login - sometimes the forums on there for AM can have useful ideas in them and there is also a filesharing area for reports, templates etc that can be useful.

The timetable is usually finalised early Autumn - there will be minor changes up until around Feb. So this year the latest and last version was 1.6, issued in Feb 2014. The provisional 1.0 timetable for next year is already out: that's dated Feb 2014 as well. I would suspect however, that in most schools the exams timetable is generated from SIMS using the basedata relevant to the courses being taken in the school; that's what I do here - its called a skeleton timetable, and can be done when the basedata becomes available in the Autumn term. This has the advantage of eliminating the subjects not taught at a school and simplifying the timetable. As most exams officers will not know exact entry details until late January (the entry deadline is mid Feb) its likely that a meaningful skeleton timetable could be produced around Feb half term. We use external invigilators here who I train, we have a session each year, with a separate one for our TA's who deal with pupils with Access arrangements. We don't train teaching staff as they generally do not supervise exams.

We have XP embedded on our tills so have not been contacted by them yet. However, we have tried just copying the software folder onto a Win 7 machine and it works no problem. Am now looking at the possibility of essentially building our own tills - ours are very basic so can easily be replaced by a cheap all in one touchscreen PC really.

I would be reluctant to give system Manager Permissions: as Matt40k points out, that essentially gives them access to everything. It seems like a catch all for them so that they don't have to worry about troubleshooting permissions. I would also be reluctant to give Personnel Officer and Attendance Manager. I don't see why a cashless catering system would need the permissions that come with those - maybe Attendance Operator and Personnel Assistant would be more appropriate. Also be careful of the School Administrator group - it sounds innocuous, but its permissions are quite wide ranging and its often confused with Administration Assistant.

Seconds Out has to be one of the best live albums ever - the live versions of some of the earlier songs are far better than the studio versions which sometimes sound a little under produced to me - the depth of sound they got in the live versions is missing in the earlier studio albums. Although there is stuff I like on all their albums my favourite is probably "A Trick of the Tail" which is somewhat whimsical in parts but has some lovely songs on it and is probably the peak of their older style work before they started to get a little more "poppy". Lamb has some classic tracks on it, but there is too much filler on there for me to consider it one of their best.

We have found that this happens if a second user has logged on using switch user without the first user logging off completely - the software only allows the first user to have control of the application.

Do you mean the databases are actually on the laptop ? We do actually use a laptop as part of our Disaster Recovery Plan - a script copies the databases to a laptop that sits in our office and the laptop goes home with me every day. If the school burns down, the laptop becomes the SIMS server for the first few hours we are operating out of the car park. But this is strictly controlled - the laptop is not used for anything else and has hardware encryption - without the key, it is useless. Only two people have the hardware key (and no we don't keep it in the bag with the laptop !) I can't see any problem in accessing the SIMS system remotely if the correct security systems are in place: many if not most, secondary schools I would have thought have some level of remote access these days. If someone is wandering around with an unencrypted laptop with a copy of the database on it (and the IT staff don't know about it) then that is a whole other issue.

7 8 and 9 off, 10 are in this morning, 11 all day. Nice and peaceful around the building, a bit like working in the holidays.

How far away from the main building is the outbuilding and is there any trunking, ducting or cable runs that you can get to ? It might be possible to simply run some phone cable across, (or some cat 5 and use converters) if you have access. Presumably the engineer didn't realise (or didn't care) the link was by fibre.

You need to export the timetable cycle from Nova to SIMS before you do anything else. Use the Data>Export Timetable Cycle to SQL. As you work through the wizard, double check everything and in particular you need to specify a start date for the cycle which corresponds with the start of your new academic year, and give the cycle a meaningful name. Once this has been imported into SIMS, you can then do the bands.

Looking at the organisational diagram it doesn't appear to be in the schools data unit that deals with census etc and its not EDIT, so it looks like a new post.

This is a real bugbear of mine. Yes, it is a totally thankless task. I have just spent an entire weekend re-organising our staff shared area and trying to remove the thousands of photographs that have been dumped there - endless folders full of image_0001, image002, and on and on: no meaningful labels or dates, many of the kids in them no longer in school. They just create a random folder somewhere in their departmental area and copy the entire contents of the memory card (including any holiday photos, random pictures taken by their four year old in the back garden, and everything else). Have now created a whole new file system on our SAN for photos and restricted them to one named folder: the idea is to lock it and archive at the end of the year and then create a new one for next year. Trouble is, they will ignore it and just carry on dumping the stuff in their department areas.