RichP

I think that's the main issue that Inventry has. Arbor doesn't have a session mark, it just calculates it from the lesson marks. SIMS and Bromcom have a seperate field that Inventry can write to using the API. Arbor's API can only change lesson marks as there isn't anything else!

It's still not resolved for us. I spoke to Inventry and Arbor at BETT this year. Inevitably they blamed each other... Arbor were more willing to listen, the issue affects most sign-in system as I understand it, but I've not had any contact from them yet. I've not seen the help centre article before, but it does explain that it doesn't work as you might expect it to!

Hi, We are currently replacing our 65" iBoardTouch screens and 75" Promethean screens. They are all around 8 years old but currently all in working condition. There are nearly 50 in total, mostly 65" (we are fortunate to be part of the School Rebuilding Programme!). Collection only (they don't fit on the scales in the post office) from North East London. Available now, and keen to see them go to a good home.

We've been with Arbor for 5 years now and know this as a long standing problem. I've even met with the development teams at both Inventry and Arbor, clearly explaining the issue and proposing solutions. Still nothing has changed. The issue lies primarily in the fact that, unlike some other well known MIS, Arbor doesn't have a field for AM/PM that the API can write to. AM/PM is simply calculated from the available lesson marks. You are correct in the way it writes back marks, and if you've not come across it before, you'll see that a student arriving between lessons or breaks gets no mark written back to Arbor at all! We just work from a printed list of lates from Inventry and use the bulk edit to update it on Arbor. Hardly a seemless integration, but at least a reliable process. Sadly, it seems to affect most of the sign in systems that integrate with Arbor. We've looked at changing but if really question the sales people they admit it won't work the way it's expected to work.

Also have a chat with your account manager - you can purchase them upfront on a subscription model alongside the main licence rather than ad-hoc.

I've just checked the same process on our install and it looks like it works. I would take a close look at the contacts for each of the siblings and make sure they are identical and all have PR. Under Data -> Data Quality also check for suspected duplicates - they might look like they have the same guardian details but Arbor may the data stored twice. We spent a fair bit of time resolving that after moving from SIMS to Arbor.

Assuming you're referring to the capital fund, I thought LCVAP was replaced with CIF quite a while ago. CIF has made announcements for this year https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/condition-improvement-fund-2024-to-2025-outcome. Of course in the world of acronyms these days I could be talking about the wrong thing!

We struggled with this too - the curriculum structure in SIMS isn't a thing in Arbor. Whilst this gives more flexibility it does mean that you need check more to ensure students stay in the right blocks and bands. Arbor will quite happily let you put Y7 students into a Y12 class, let alone a student in 7A into a 7B! It's great for dual reg students, and for students in 6th Form resitting subjects for example. Make good use of the import spreadsheets, then at least you can do the checking outside of Arbor. I tend to create a Teaching Group (think of it like a Linear Block in T6) and populate it with subjects. I use the import to make sure everyone is in the right block for 1 subject, then use that to populate the linear blocks with students. With regards to your Option Blocks, I assume they are structured like 10X/Sp, 10X/Fr, 10X/CS etc? In which case try the Add option on a student's enrolment page and type 10X to see just the 10X classes with the current course numbers. You will need to delete the old enrolment, unless you just use that for numbers and then Transfer them instead. You can see a better overview from the Table View via School -> Programme -> Courses for all courses. As with everything Arbor, the Roadmap is the place to go to suggest obvious improvements that they could make! https://portal.productboard.com/arbor-education/1-arbor-development-roadmap/c/362-enrolment Happy to show you how we make it work if that would help, just message me.

We've been with Arbor for nearly 3 years as a 11-18 secondary with 1550 students. Migration was pretty good when we did it, and I think it's only got better. Take some time to look at the things that integrate with SIMS - not all work the same despite claiming to integrate. We use Firefly, for example, and three years on they still haven't sorted the integration out properly. Make sure you take advantage of all of the training regardless of the MIS you move to - don't underestimate this as part of the change process. If you need another reason to consider moving, look at https://bringmoredata.blogspot.com/2023/08/ to see the dwindling market share that SIMS has. Arbor is super quick compared to SIMS without a doubt. We still struggle with some large data sets, but the page filters are powerful enough to get around those limitations. Keep an eye on the Roadmap https://portal.productboard.com/arbor-education/1-arbor-development-roadmap/tabs/6-working-on-now to see what, and how much, they develop plus the change log https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/6790058820253-Arbor-Change-Log. Forget the infrequent SIMS updates that break as much they fix, Arbor is constantly innovating and improving. We have direct support with them but you can get support from plenty of 3rd party companies too. Functionality wise we've dropped quite a few apps - seating planner, payments, comms for example. Worthwhile considering those potential savings. Data export via Livefeeds or the Power BI addon is a bit of game changer if you value the analysis of the data in the MIS. They've pulled in some new AI features now to draft letters and reports. It's not perfect, but at least it has ambitions to be! Rich

Having built some dashboards using live feeds I found that large data sets typically time out anyway. Our Arbor seems to be down at the moment but I think we pull lesson attendance via CRW. Have you looked at BI connector pricing recently, they have changed to fixed price rather than per pupil, although don't forget your Power BI user licences too. Although looking quickly at https://support.arbor-education.com/hc/en-us/articles/7745552147485-Microsoft-Power-BI-Connector-Datasets#attendance-0-0 and my Snowflake instance I don't think it extracts more than session marks.

When we moved to Arbor we opted for Edval having been impressed with it's functionality. It's big selling point is it's automation of the timetable, something that T6 does but not well. There are countless and not particularly well documented, options to tweak it with all of the insights you already have about the timetable. It builds 98% of the timetable well, and makes it near impossible to make a tweak. Want to swap some classes in a linear block? Nope. Want to swap some rooms around consistently for a class? Nope. We used this the first year they introduced the Arbor sync and it was stressful to say the least. We use Timetabler now, so I don't know if it's improved over the last year but we renewed Timetabler again this year. Neither have the tight integration with the curriculum structure that T6 had and as much as SIMS had very strict curriculum membership and structure rules it's quite the opposite in Arbor and not in a good way (unless the you operate a school in which the laws of physics don't apply). I still have a number of reservations about the timetable and curriculum management in Arbor. There isn't the ability the manage the timetable in either Edval or Timetabler and sync it back and forth as was possible in T6. There is limited functionality for timetabler, but it's broken easily.

Hi, Just to add to this thread we've been with Arbor for nearly two years now. As a large (1550 pupils, 11-18) secondary we've struggled too. We started out with Edval but no longer use it due the integration issues. We tried the very first iteration of that and it was clear that while it showed potential, neither side were clear on the requirement. Timetable integration is better, but lacks the approach the T6 had and still requires a lot of manual tweaking. On the plus side, the less rigid approach to the structure allows for interventions, detentions and other ad hoc things to be included on a students timetable. The recent inclusion of the ability to deal with clashes, albeit in quite a clumsy and time consuming way is an improvement. More frustrating is changing a students enrolments and waiting a seemingly indeterminate amount of time for it to be reflected on a calendar. Or then trying to print a new student timetable and trying to find a two weeks that are in the future and don't have a holiday in it. We came from using InTouch for comms, over which Arbor is a huge improvement but that's a low bar to compare it to! Payments is improving but still needs work. We still have integration issues - things that worked well with SIMS are still not working properly with Arbor. Firefly and Inventry top the list. I've been back and forth with Arbor and Inventry but that fact that it fundamentally doesn't work seems to be both accepted by Arbor but relegated to the roadmap. Arbor have a seemingly robust roadmap and RICE prioritisation, but I think it gets dominated by primary needs not secondary. I've lost count of the times I've been told by support to contribute to the roadmap for something that clearly needs to be fixed not improved. I won't get started on the Post-16 census element of Arbor either, because it makes me cry. I've yet to be convinced the system is scaled to cope with large data sets. Want an attendance summary for a half-term? Nope. Want behaviour exported for a few weeks. Nope. Want a live feed to power bi? Nope. We were sold Arbor as the solution to replace our third party integrations, but the opposite seems to be true. Account Management has improved, but still seems focussed on upselling add-ons (another bug bear) over understanding customer need. Richard

I don't think it's possible with their SMS provider. You can set a signature to add automatically to the end of each SMS though under School -> Communications -> Setup -> SMS Settings.

I realise this is digressing from the original post! We too had concerns about individual reports in Arbor and admittedly there is still work to be done but we have found a perfectly acceptable way of doing the reports, and being able to publish them quickly on the Parent Portal is a plus. Worth noting that there is push within Arbor to develop this area further I believe.

I suppose it depends how creative you are with your Word mail merges and who they need to go to. You can design a Custom Report in Arbor and then use it's Mail Merge feature to email or generate a PDF with the data from the report in it. If you do fancy things with tables and other more advanced layout features there is nothing to stop you exporting that data to an excel file as a live feed and then using that as the source for the Mail Merge in Word. We moved to Arbor in January of this year, having been a long standing SIMS customer and we've found that the ease of communication for any group in Arbor has replaced some of the lengthy merges we used to have. Simple things like the ability of class teacher to select some or all of their class and email their parents in matter of moments has transformed some of our communication processes. That said we did come from using InTouch...

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We are seeking to appoint a highly-motivated, ambitious and hard-working colleague to join our friendly and supportive IT Support Team in the role of Senior IT Technician. The IT Support Team support all aspects of the IT provision for 1600 students and 170 staff. The successful candidate will assist the Senior Network Administrator and IT Technician in ensuring the secure, reliable and effective operation of all the IT services. An ideal role for someone with experience working in a school or college and looking to advance their career. Senior IT Technician required for more details or PM me for more information.

Would Reports -> Curriculum Analysis -> List of classes for a years (choose all years) work? It will bring out teacher name rather than code but an xlookup to another list would solve that. You are spot on with the way in ends up in Excel, it's rubbish. A text to columns with a Fixed Width will usually tidy the majority of it up I found in the past though. Not ideal I know and amongst the reasons i'm not a SIMS customer anymore!

That it can run as a satellite install should give away the fact that T6 doesn't haven't any SQL backend! It's barely a 32bit app as it is... Unfortunately your reporting is limited to what you can see on screen and save as csv or from the built-in reports. What sort of data are you looking to get

Ok, I should confess we've moved from SIMS to Arbor and it quite happily let's me do that without affecting group membership for other lessons. I assumed it created a clash and left both memberships intact. How many different groups are onsite with how many staff? Edit marks works nicely with User Defined Groups which (once the group membership is setup) is a quicker way of bulk editing their attendance.

Have you taken a look at Alternative Curriculum? This floats over the regular curriculum and can be assigned in a more flexible way than the main timetable. Capita have a video on that (if you are the one who understands T6) https://support.capitasoftware.com/sys_attachment.do?sys_id=eed5e6aedb7d2450109770ba689619e5.

That would Tools -> Define Period Times I believe, which is the easy bit. Beware the need to export the Timetable Cycle after doing this, and the need to reapply the timetable and check lesson monitor setup as well. If you are changing the cycle, check for any future attendance marks first as you may lose them. SIMS KB KB0021998 might be useful to you.

Things to check: When you create the user in System Manager, you need to search for staff and find them select them in the list that appear below. Entering their details and hitting continue won't match to their personnel account and subsequently any timetable. It's worth checking Focus, Person, Manage Classroom Staff to make sure they are active for the current year, have a staff code and working pattern. Also, if you hit the Timetable link on their Personnel record does it have anything on it?

Yes, technically there's no reason they couldn't both be on the same server. You'll need to consider the other parts of SIMS, you'll need two Document Management Servers running on different ports for example. I'm not sure if you might need two separate SOLUS installs? I think my biggest concern in doing this would be resourcing the server. There are a number of sims process (census, validate memberships, academic promotion, bulk attendance editing) that can be very CPU intensive and SIMS isn't very good at doing much else whilst those things happen. That's bad enough if it affects one school, worse if it effects two! Have you 3rd party apps (Wonde, Groupcall etc) that synchronise data to other systems. Are they able to access two SIMS databases from one installation, or will they need two?

Active subjects infer that there is a course manager course with current student/class memberships. In theory you should be marking courses that don't run anymore as obsolete, but because they don't appear in the default view for course manager they tend to build up.