scholarpack

Hi Leia Can't remember if this breaks EduGeek's marketing rules.. but we noticed you weren't getting much response on here. If you'd like, we can put you in touch directly with some schools that have recently migrated from Bromcom? Best to contact the person who was handling your sale. Cheers Rich

Most MIS suppliers either moved to the cloud years ago or are now catching up and plan to offer cloud based solutions. Older onsite products will slowly be phased out. Not immediately, but eventually. There's a reason Capita are effectively being forced to adapt to this model. They realise if they don't move SIMS to the cloud, their customer base will shrink by 3% a year over the next decade. At the primary level, there is more and more growth every year to cloud based MIS (just check the census stats). Once primaries go cloud, they don't go back. The pros and cons are more nuanced for secondaries clearly. My prediction is that schools won't even be able to buy locally hosted MIS within 3-5 years. As a company, we haven't offered local hosting since 2011 and it's been a very good decision. Rich

Sep 2017 might look interesting...

I think this MIS forum is predominantly secondary school admin/users. ScholarPack as you probably know is a primary only MIS so maybe that's why no one has piped up.

Sounds like a worthwhile project, if only to build awareness that changing MIS is possible with too much headache. If you do a series on MIS at the Primary level, please feel free to get in touch, we'd be happy to help.

Essential 1) Easy to use - increase staff engagement.. 2) Easy to deploy - hosted or not? We believe hosted is the right choice in 2015. 3) Easy to access - can teachers easily access in the classroom, from home, on a trip, etc? 4) Integrated modules - does assessment talk to MIS, is comms/SMS integrated with attendance 5) Friendly support - can you speak to someone when you need to Desirable I imagine that list is different for every customer! But primary Free Schools tend to want: 1) out-of-the-box assessment tied into the new curriculum 2) web based/cloud based 3) tablet friendly 4) lots of guidance re statutory returns in year 1 5) Open, easy to use, free to use API so they can tie in other 3rd party software where required

Anti-monopolies authorities are concerned was business malpractices and leveraging an unfair competetive advantage - for example if the large player in a market reduced their price to £0 for a contract extension, in order to shut out competitors and gain the business at full price again in future, in the hope that the small competitor will not be around by then. Anti-monopolies authorities are not at all concerned with what features are in, or not in, the various products on the market. Implementing "good ideas quickly" isn't illegal..some companies are just quicker at innovating than others.. Disclosure: I'm CEO of a cloud based Primary MIS supplier.

We are here indeed! Like Graham says there are many different options now for Primary schools aside from SIMS and CMIS. Graham's site is a really good place to start to compare your options. I think you'll find the newer providers have a lot to offer in terms of functionality compared to the traditional options. I was excited at BETT this year to see more entrants to the MIS market. Don't be fooled into thinking that you only have a limited set of options.

An experienced Linux Server Administrator / Network Manager is needed to join a young and growing business which specialises in producing software for the education sector. Histon House Ltd was founded in August 2010 and produces ScholarPack, a cloud based Management Information System (MIS) for schools. Please see here for full job description: http://goo.gl/RtCkko

I think there's about 15 suppliers now including Independents! Good to see 4 or 5 new players trying to break into UK MIS market at BETT.

No problem at all. But some might argue that it undermines the key message and advantage the government are trying to push with G Cloud.

We have two methods of interoperability with 3rd parties: 1) an XML API which requires the 3rd party to pull data via a REST web service (hourly, daily, or however often they prefer) 2) manual export and import of data via a variety of methods like CSV, XML and CTF. Please give us a call on the support desk tomorrow AM and we can advise as to the method. Thanks

In case anyone is wondering, ScholarPack didn't enter the G Cloud 5 applications due to migrating a considerable number of new customers at that time. We didn't want any distractions. We'll be going for the next round of applications when they open in Autumn this year. In theory G Cloud is a great idea, but as several posters have stated in this thread, there needs to be more clarity around what sort of applications are allowed on the Cloudstore. I don't think I'd be saying anything controversial if I said a hosted windows based application is not how most customers envisage 'cloud' software working. For example, one could host LotusNotes from 1999 via a VPN and sell access to customers, but I'm pretty sure having that as a product on the 'Cloudstore' would raise some eyebrows.

Sure, that's the risk I'm talking about. Of course there is a multitude of highly important, even fundamental, open source software on the web like Apache etc but it's an entirely different market over in MIS land. Moodle might work, but VLEs aren't considered mission critical/funding dependent, so plenty of people will take a punt on those. You're right about the market's specific requirements and that's perhaps why open source is not a great fit. Generally, if the development requirements are large, it works better in software with huge possible userbases. Interested to hear what you'd consider a big idea.

This is part of the problem open source attempts have come up against. Schools aren't willing to take the risk on a tiny, untested provider with no track record even though they usually have the same or similar legal obligations as the larger suppliers with regards to data protection, data security and so on. And open Source just isn't perceived as secure or corporate enough for the edutech sector. I don't believe there are actually any Open Source MIS packages that UK schools can actually use as of 2014. Coming through this 'entering the market' process is painstakingly slow for newer suppliers, open source or otherwise, hence why there are about 4 of us in the last decade who have actually made a dent in the state sector, and many that have come and gone in that period too!