Banjo

Don't panic - seen this before many times - Capita / your support team will fix without data loss.

Is this beacuse they are not using result sets to timestamp the results over the school year?

It depends what part of the country you live in if you want to attend courses and have support visits that don't cost £1100 per time.

Yes they would be usable as a last resort. They wouldn't have been detached properly from SQL but if they were all you had you could send they off to Capita to fix and get most of your data back.

30 day free trial might be worth a punt ?

We use Solus 3 on servers but don't deploy the agents to the workstations. The Servers will upgrade overnight when we release the upgrade and the clients upgrade on first use the next day using the same process as Solus 2. For new client installs we do have the option of running the install setups manually or installing an agent and running in a mixed environment. Seems to work for now.

I hope you have backups made from inside of Facility as restoring SQL backups is always fun (not). If you have customised eportal you will need to restore this folder and also your config ini files otherwise you will have quite a bit of tweaking to do.

If they have sent you all the files try AutoRun.exe or Index.hta. A window will pop up that says upgrade SIMS > click and go as long as everyone is off. Just running SIMSApplicationsetup will not upgrade the DB and you wont be able to login.

TT printing in Facility is a nightmare. The hours spent trying to create a useable staff/student print off was $£&*! annoying It also used to crash a lot when auto scheduling, but printing was it's biggest drawback.

Might be worth putting a script in to restart SQL overnight.

Are you an independent or an academy acting as their own admission authority? Most schools including acadmies get an ATF/CTF from their LA?

Have a look here Products - see how your school can benefit from Schoolcomms

Is this for parents or staff to fill in?

You should use the SA password to attach the DB. After that use your regular user/pass to login. You can also use the restore option from a .bak file.

Run SIMSSQLApplicationSetup. At this point you can choose where to install in to. You need to point this to the Binn folder of the new 2012 instance you have just installed. Run dbattach from that folder once its done. You can alternatively install it to a temp folder location and just copy the contents to the Binn folder afterwards.

Domain admin?

Permissions issue?

What permissions/polices is the server pulling off the domain and what account are you trying to install it with? You can use the Capita SQL express installer that will have the correct settings rather than one off the MS website.

Even though you are no longer subscribing to their service/products you are asked to pay around 40% of the full licence fee in case you need to access old data using the your old application. This is very much a 12 months licence arrangement rather than Capita's annual maintenance. I always backup and restore Facility into an MS Access DB to make looking up the odd student record easier along with plenty of csv files of student attendance records.

Sounds like permissions. When you test the connection from within SIMS does it come back with OK? You have the option to uninstall/reinstalling as it's pretty quick and easy job.

Why do you need another server? Install a new SQL instance on the same DB server as Facility (as long as it's currently SQL2012 or above) at no extra cost. You can install SIMS on the same server as facility and it will work quite happily. At some point after you have migrated you will want to turn Facility off. That will be a case of disabling the eportal/data services and unsharing the application folder. You also need to factor in that Advanced Learning will try to sting you for about 40% of your current Facility Licence in future payments after you have migrated away from SIMS to access Facility for "historical data". The migration isn't something you can do by yourself and takes a lot of planning around statutory returns and exams to ensure you have what's needed in full.

SIMS is around the three and half pound per pupil mark for primaries. 300 pupils works out at just over £1000 pounds, not a great deal of money if you ask me in the grand scheme of things.

I would change the port number from 8080. I would also set up IIS and create a self certificate and run the shortcut in classrooms to that address.

I know of a primary school who got Integris free last year from RM. I don't know of the on going cost after year one. The people in the school who used SIMS wish they hadn't changed MIS.

Two Ways. Create three aapects in SIMS and type them in anld then pull thiose values into the report. Or Build a template that calculates whether they have passed Eng A*-C based on the points value. The same for Maths. Then all the other subjects etc. You can then do counts and work out whether they passed the headline measure. VA might be more of an issue though