Banjo

Another con, the user base of Progresso is small, and probably falling - so this will lead to a number of consequences for those schools that are using it. The pool of people familiar to the system is limited and the amount of money invested into the system won't be as much as when Facility had 1600+ schools using the system. Progresso was initially supposed to be all singing all dancing, but that was quickly scaled back and modules were stripped out of the design to get the product to market.

"13 credible suppliers in the market"

You need to pull in a laptop you can see and a laptop you can't and compare and contrast their setup.

Use Excel. I've been asked over the year to create a TT for PRU's and its a nightmare to administrate. When a students TT can change every week it becomes to much to manage within an MIS.

Domain changes aren't generally an issue. If your renaming the server then deattach the Sims DB - rename Sims server and then reattach Sims Db.

Are you is the right dataset? Has the dataset got any students in it?

As Phil has said below, it's very close. I can only comment on what I have seen that has been shown in a public environment. Lets hope the news in March isn't Capita are launching the product in 2 years time :-)

What system are you using and what part of the system has this been recorded in?

This is past the planning stage or a PowerPoint, Capita have shown it live at demos.

Try doing all of those things on the server during a busy period of the day. If it works then it's not the SIMS/DB installation but something on the networking side.

Only if Link to ICT publish it on their website and give it away for free. They probably email it out to those school that purchase their support, if you buy give them a ring and ask for a copy. Be careful importing other LA's definitions, not something I would do on a live system.

They are a technical partner of Capita. RECORDLINKwriter | Capita SIMS They are also offering a free trial Cohesion - Trial. If this is the full fat version for 10 days - then problem solved. Free 10 Day Trial of RECORDLINKwriter Try RECORDLINKwriter free of charge for 10 days. To order your trial call the Capita SIMS team on 0845 4603042 or fill in the form below. You will receive an email with your trial Product Key and instructions on how to get started.

I have a feeling that you will need to manually download them and then upload them onto your new system if you want to keep them.

If you ask Schoolcomms the nice people will give you a free trial

All returns even will be entered into the PTA prize draw and you and your child could win a ipad Photo of prize goes here ! Give a copy to the kids in form time so they can see the letter and you'll get more returns.

At one point CMIS was scheduled to go with MS office reporting like SIMS, I even played with a development version that linked in to Office and it had potential. However, it was based on an old platform of code and the whispers where that nobody really understood how it all went together, especially after the development left Ireland and the plug was pulled and along came Progresso.

It's slightly amusing that RM are paying Capita to support SIMS when they have their own product they are trying to push. How much of a price difference are we talking about and also are you an academy?

Although, to get CMIS to do these things you need a certain skill set and experience with the system. SIMS is click a button reporting, CMIS is coding with no yellow highlight to tell you where you've missed a comma or bracket in an expression. With fewer schools using CMIS the pool of people with relevant experience in reporting is declining. The same is true for the application itself. It's interesting that Tony Lockwood (formerly Serco Learning - CMIS/Facility) now works for Phil Neil working on SIMS product development.

You can bodge it then The Documentation button (top right) opens up a web page for the help files. You could just replace this webpage with your own file or redirect to your room page, or merge the two documents together so users can still access the hyperlinks to the content areas that are on the original index page.

I still think waiting is your best option. Capita are close to releasing the next version of SIMS. It might or might not have been worth the wait -time will tell, but they are currently the biggest player in the market, so it makes sense to see what they can offer. I didn't go to BETT so they might have shown a demo of SiMS8 on their stand to give schools a flavour of whats to come or they might be playing their cards very close to their chest.

You can do this from the SIMS Shortcut panel. Create a new Panel add the External shortcut (change from .exe to all files) and choose the document. As long as the document name stays the same and just gets updated each day then it should work. Or you could set everyone's Home Page or Bookmark on the toolbar to be the URL you want them to go to and open up a specific browser from SIMS. I have a horrible feeling that this has to be done at a user level :-(

With the next version of Sims around the corner might be worth holding fire on a change of MIS until its released. I pity the LA involved having to deal with one of the suppliers on the list

Capita could add it as a line to the annual maintenance agreement - Test Server - £x per annum

Remember to change the Doc Server settings to point to the new server name. Also, and it might not effect what you are testing, but some parts of SIMS doesn't like a server name change with an attached DB. You might get away with this on a test environment, but it's a pain in the neck on a live one. I've had to hack host files in the past to get bits to work because a 3rd party IT person has renamed the SIMS server to their naming convention.

I haven't got a paper guide as we install SIMS from a script. You should be able to get away with SQL Express install with a names instance and use an SA password. And this is where is gets tricky - You need to install doc server on the Workstation so you will need the an up to date .exe to install it. You can pretty much copy and paste the rest of SIMS to the workstation including the program files folder where the apps live. Change the connect ini to point to the new server name and Sims is ready to go. Restore the db using db attach - login, change the DOc server settings to point to the new server name, then upload a test document against a student, then look for the doc server folder structure and copy the old docs into it.