Bromcom_John

If anyone wants them, Pebble, to then just tell them to get in touch with our 3rd party support team. The API is free and becoming accredited is likewise zero cost (at least no cost from us.. time spent is its own costs obviously). Same goes for the OP. IF you are looking to produce a service covering a particular school need, talk to Wonde/Groupcall/Salamander. You will be able to develop for the API of our own or any competitor MIS but using the 3rd party experts as cited in the previous sentence, can reduce your integration workload enormously. Don't oversimplify the need though. ParentPay might seem quite narrow band and specific but.. and this is just opinion, school payments is its own hellishly complicated can of worms as most schools do things quite differently from one another and everyone of them will tell you that "their" way is the only sensible way of operating! The project aim of "allowing schools to take digital payment" might seem simple but.. and these are just off the top of my head Will you be providing payment methods for different vendors (apple Pay, stripe, paypoint) Is it going to allow for short term parent debt Will it provide an integrated offline payments option Is it just for one aspect of payments? Or are you aiming to account for a variety eg. Dinners, uniform, clubs, wraparound care, charity donations, child care vouchers How will your refunds be processed? Is there going to be a delay? What are the transaction charges going to look like? On that last one, during the development of our own online payments elements with the MCAS interface I was gob smacked during conversations with certain payment providers to discover the underlying entry level costs for per transaction fees. Paypoint is a GREAT Service (especially in inner city schools with patchy credit records) but it is NOT cheap. Other Edugeekers have already said this but, the education sector is crazy with regulations, they are all available in the various gov.uk web spaces. Get everything you can and get yourself a business model planned out before you even put a single line of code down. It would be extremely easy to get a fair way in only to find out your new code baby isn't going to be viable. I've seen big foreign operations with existing function trying to break into the UK market only to back off due to the weight of legislation. That said, I heartily welcome anyone to the sector with the eagerness and vision to try and use their time to improve the lot of any school! It is a great way to consider spending your effort and I personally wish you every success.

Hi Arthur, you might want to indicate which MIS you are using. Makes it hard to offer suggestion otherwise. If you are using Bromcom then you need to specify the correct active date for your data. The student selector will always default to todays date for the selection and this would preclude your year 11 leavers.

Also agree with the title change for the original thread. Although I do think that this news is SO big that it does warrant its own discussion. The provision of MIS and now its support are a two pronged pincer on schools capability to operate their systems, not just MIS. Firstly we have the alleged restrictive practices we are hearing about with regards schools wanting to move away from the software.. and now we have an apparent attack on the ecosystem of support around the remaining SIMS schools. I think people might have different opinions/experience to bring to this thread that might get a bit lost in a single thread covering all topics. Like Damon, I am biased to want the support teams to flourish, although for entirely different reasons. Choice is important in the MIS space and that extends to the choice of who you take your support from. Direct can be of benefit but support teams can and do offer something that the MIS providers may not be able to with centralised support and that is a more personal and local experience which can even be folded into a more unified technical support offering. Also, I think that somewhere to talk about things that are not necessarily ESS related is a worthwhile separation.

There is also now a green flash as well to indicate that a sub code has been selected (for things like Y)

It also manifests in the online gaming community as a thing to take if you cannot handle losing "Copium"

What Darren said. It's just one of the options on the Integration configuration page within the system, either MIcrosoft or Google.

and release one of the new web timetable has in fact hit the cloud! It is very much a first release, lots of stuff to come down the pipeline (Auto scheduling etc.) Took me around 30m to get my head around it without reading the manual (I'm stubborn that way) Reported a couple of nice to have to the team that are not there at the moment, only to be happily informed that they are all already on the roadmap but that auto scheduling was the priority for release 2.

Looking good from what I have seen. The team presented their preliminary release a couple week back and it was well received. So look to see stage 1 out before the end of the year, just don't quote me as I am not in that decision pipeline

Not with a Bromcom hat on here really, but in my experience it is very important that you ask the questions important to your school/MAT during your procurement. The last thing you want is to just go with what you saw, from any supplier, without asking the challenging questions. Use your demo and presentation time with us, with Arbor, with whomever to challenge on what you need. The demo's I enjoy delivering more than any other are the ones when someone asks "can it do X?" and you have to think, to ensure it is going to do what is being asked. To then demonstrate or at least verbalise how you can envision the system doing that. If it won't do it, the supplier should tell you straight. If it is something coming down the pipe, that should be clear as well. Transparency and clarity on top of everything else.

I am aware that a overhaul of Cover is on the cards within the dev roadmap. It has been working in its current form for quite a few years, so is due some TLC I recommend that anyone interested take a look at the following link.. https://whatsnew.bromcomcloud.com/ Have a look through recent developments and also, I think you might be able to take a look at a few upcoming ideas. Unfortunately you'll be too late for the quarterly release webinar, I think those took place yesterday.

I would come on here a lot more and extol the virtues of our own product but honestly I still haven't got my head around the fact that, since we took on the sponsorship, I can So many years of having to tread carefully ere my account get slapped by the mods!

I wholeheartedly welcome the new batch of robot overlords!

@Bromcom onboarding 99% of your staff will take around an hour. The heavy users get full training that can be repeated as often as you like at no extra cost. It is a challenge, but it is a challenge that we (and by that I don't just mean us at Bromcom) have been delivering against for years now.

Morning all, This is the phase 1 release which is mostly a proof of concept that the AI tools are going to be functional and accessible within the MIS environment. Even once we begin the rollout of Phase 2, which is when the systems will start being able to give responses based on the schools own data, the CHatGPT subsystems will not be exposed to school specific data. So just to repeat, that when using Bromcom AI, no Management Information System (MIS) data or user information is transmitted to OpenAI within the MIS platform. It is important to note that in this phase 1 release, all information voluntarily entered by the user in the free text chat box within the Bromcom AI panel ie "the question", is transmitted to OpenAI, similar to the behaviour of ChatGPT. We absolutely acknowledge the paramount importance of user privacy at all times and will update the relevant policy terminology to reflect this. As far as I am aware the team are aiming to have the functional prototype of "phase 2" ready to show at our Shard event in a few weeks.

Hi Alistair, I think you are correct on the us to Arbor front as well. I recall talking to a fair few happy users who were "unhappy" about having to move due to a Trust level decision. The choosing to return to SIMS is something that flabbergasts me as well. John

and my technical colleague provided me answers as well 1> When a user types in a question we only send the question to ChatGPT or an Azure bot to understand what the user is looking for. Once we get a ‘machine understandable’ version of the user question we then go to our database to pick up data from the respective school. This is the returned to user. ChatGPT is therefore completely agnostic about the data we have in our database. At no point is our data or database exposed to ChatGPT or any third party. 2> Should the answer to the user’s question be found in the internet then we obviously avoid going to our database and rely on ChatGPT’s answer to show to the customer. So in both cases ChatGPT never has access to our data or database. This ensures we are compliant with GDPR and protect our customers’ data.

Feel free to head over to the stand for a demo if you want to see what the potential is. In answer to your question, and I can get actual technical updates from the team once they arrive and I can chat with them (real chat, not AI). The implementation is entirely self contained where your own schools data is concerned. It is going to reach out to the web for certain things, like in your example of the retirement age staff. It will have reached out to the web for that data in terms of what retirement age "is" but then securely into your data to identify which of your staff are within that scope. Everything is controlled within the existing data usage agreements and there will not be any use of your data to provision requests from other schools, unless you are already signed up to the data service agreement. One of the big directions of development is to use the AI capability to live translate data within communications. Have a parent of an EAL student with German as their mother tongue, the system will live translate the message a d send it in Gmrnan. In reverse, the incoming message in German will be translated back into English. It really is massive area of potential development.

HI @bobsmith, short answer is "Yes", We have always offered buy out options, even before the ESS debacle came into view. I won't go into details on here, but this link takes to our page that explains it. Alternatively you can reach out to our team, myself included, to discuss it in more detail.

Just a reminder that you can also reach out to us and we can put you in touch with schools who might not be subscribed to EduGeek

Also a dog owner but more than happy to highlight the negatives. 1 - Crossing something with a poodle reduces moulting/makes them hypoallergenic - Doesn't always work. Poodle crosses are supposed to make for easier coat maintenance but it doesn't always breed true. Also crossing "anything" with a poodle gives you a much more active dog. Poodles are a working breed so whatever you end up with is going to have more energy. Also, be careful as the type of poodle can have a big affect. Toy, Miniature and mainstream poodles are incredibly different in size and this will have an impact, obviously, on the pup 2 - All dogs will be a bit messy, house training helps but you will still have to deal with going out and getting muddy 3 - Life long commitment - people do say that dogs are good training for having kids. You already have kids so imagine a permanent toddler being added to the family. 4 - Trashing the house - Yes, it is trainable though but there will be (assuming puppy) a period of unavoidable destruction as they learn. 5 - Cockerpoo's don't bark - Tell that to my sister, her dog Humphrey is a terrible barker. My mums on the other hand, quiet as a church mouse.. dogs are not cookie cutter examples of their breed. They vary

Please check the August 9th release as the Performance management section has had its content added to the individual staff profile page. https://whatsnew.bromcomcloud.com/en/administration-_-performance-management-2?role=s_gVGlXklO4437%3Bs_myPMwBVe5992 Hopefully that resolves the issue.

I know the team are aware and are dealing. Try it now, my own system is now responding quickly, as I would expect.

Hi @kennysarmy I doubt anyone will be able to answer you yet as the O365 integration was only released this week. We did have a webinar yesterday going through the details and the MANY questions, this will probably get published at some point. So we are in the process of engaging with early adopters now.

We can provide you info on the Google integration. Just get in touch via the usual channels (got told off for putting my email on here)

If you need any assistance then you can just contact the onboarding team who will be able to assist you. The development team recently finished al of the Google integration and are working on expanding the O365 integration next.