Banjo

If you have access to FFT data you could add in est. 'A' for those subjects, and subtract the predicted grades from them, and work out whether you will be below the Dfe floor (avg -1/2 a grade difference), or averaging +1 grade above and get a free pass from an Ofsted inspection for 12 months.

A must watch for Solus 3 fans.

It could be done in a similar vane to the new EYFSP tracking within Sims. B2 is pretty awful, the new EYFSP is still new and clunky (screen sizes are all wrong and too easy to use the wrong resultset) but it's still miles better than B2.

The plan is to restore the backup into MS Access on a standalone machine. What becomes a bit more complicated is the attendance. I can't think of an easy way to pull a students attendance record out of facility if ever you need to take it to court as evidence. It's hard enough making it work as a report within Facility as % att is calculated on the fly rather than stored against a pupils in the DB, let alone having to write some VBA in Access that looks up dates and records across half a dozen tables. I can see a lot of printing to PDF in the time ahead and then uploading the pdf's to Sims doc store.

Are there any LA's or schools that have used Facility in the past 5 years but have moved on to bigger and better things, who are now being chased by Advanced Learning for license payments (75% of current license fee) to store historical data within their schools? I know Capita don't charge if you move away from Sims, and Serco never used to charge their schools moving from Facility. Advanced Learning seem to have their own set of rules.

That's a difficult one as a lot of Raise analysis compares the schools' performance with national and shows the difference as significant or not. You're not going to know the national until October each year and Raise is usually out for secondaries in November. What you should be doing is comparing against estimates of pupil attainment from the likes of FFT, if you don't like A,B, or D you have the option to configure your own.

Hi Rich, We have a school that are trying to send a 'CES' Update file to the LA but are struggling (wrong file type). Might be an idea to email all of your schools with simple instructions on how to accomplish this task as they are getting quite frustrated. Thanks

Did this a long time ago. Had to duplicate the WAR files from memory. It did work ok, but we had two eportals on the same server connected to two different databases (federated school). I think it would be easier to add a VM.

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure schools are locked in to any MIS these days as there seems to be quite a bit of movement in the market. LA's need a central database, and Capita have this end of the market sewn up. Maybe emerging MIS suppliers are going about it the wrong way round. Develop an central database first, and get the LA to then sell the schools the MIS for them

Hi All, Quick question for those of you that have some experience with this system. Can it produce an export file that in compatible with the LA's Capita One system. Facility can produce a file, Sims can (when it works) and with a couple of schools moving from Sims to ScholarPack it would be interesting to know what information can be exported

Has anyone else noticed that when pupils who are registered as statemented on Sims get exported via Sims Data Exchange | Immediate Tasks that their SEN value in the export file comes out as a N for no SEN. This has only happened since the last upgrade. The scheduled data export task has been broken for over 18 months and does not export FSM information (xml tag is missing from the record) for pupils who are no longer eligible for FSM. This is causing us a big headache trying to export data from Sims to import into our Central Database - another Capita product!

Have a look on the forums. They also did some webinars as to how it worked with 2008.

So we shouldn’t expect a rise in annual maintenance this year

Centrastage had scripts to roll out SQL2008 and all the pre requisites and even attach the DB to the new instance. I'm sure they'll have a script for 2012 as well. http://www.centrastage.com/

A bit like the tiles in Windows 8:eek:

Arbor does look interesting. I've heard that there are 13 Sims schools (Inf, Jnr, Primary & Sec) in one LA that are piloting/trialling the system. It would be good to hear feedback on how this goes.

Is that 1mil to buy the IP outright or (a) A payoff of the previous aggreement between Patni & Serco which may have included minimum sales target per year over so many years. (b) Buying the exclusive rights to sell Progresso in the UK from 2013? 1mil for the out right IP to a MIS(s) seems pretty low. Est. of 2000 schools paying an average of £5k a year in licencing brings in a revenue of 10mil a year.

My understanding is that Serco Learning didn't hold the IP rights to Facility or Progresso. Progresso was rumoured to be costing £20mil to develop by Patni. Who owns the rights to Facility/Progresso now is an interesting question.

I think you can miss the first step out (creating value columns) and just add 4 points to the assessment level. This process assumes that the entry levels had the appropriate NC points levels in the gradeset to begin with

Try printing on a 32bit machine

From my understanding going down the single site hosting route is going to have some major disadvantages, certainly in the begining. If you are hosted by Serco then all the schools within that cluster will be able to swap custom reports that they have written. If you are hosting yourself, then you would have to recreate the reports from scratch, or hope that Serco incorportate that report into a general release along with the other standard reporting set.

I'm sure that in one of the Becta rerports on MIS there was a table of all suppliers and the number of schools that they currently supported. From memory Bromcom was around the 20 school mark, but that figure would be a couple of years old now.

SQL will love the additional memory and extra cores and performance will be improved. However, the clock speed of the new server 2.8Ghz is lower than the outgoing 3.2Ghz and Eportal does like it clock speed on a single core!

Have you tried rebooting - [yeah I know], but I've had dbattach failures that a reboot has solved.

Good stuff Why don't you turn the old server into an eportal server, as the CPU is clocked higher than the new server?