Schoolcomms

Yes payments will be in the School Gateway app around March/April time. (Along with a whole bunch of other stuff)

Progress continues apace: The iPhone app is pretty much complete and ready to go in the app store, just a bit more work to do on payments. The Android app is coming along nicely, and we have started on the Web version in anger now: We are now officially on the hunt for field trial schools - PM me if you are interested. You basically get the product for free for a while in return for giving us some feedback. (this will also include the ability to schedule the Schoolcomms import) Also we are keen to provide some reports to the school on who is actually using Online Reporting and how, we thought this would be a good start, let me know if you think different: School Gateway Summary (one line for each calendar month): Number of registered users (Total) | Number of registered users (app installed) | Number of students with at least one registered parent | Number of registered students | Number of registered staff | Unique visitors (parents) | Visits (parents) | Unique visitors (Students) | Visits (Students) | Unique visitors (Staff) | Visits (Staff) | Visits (app) | Visits (web) Students without a School Gateway registered parent (one line per student): Forename | Surname | Form | Year Online Reporting usage summary (one line per calendar month): Behaviour notifications sent (app) | Behaviour notifications sent (SMS) | Achievement notifications sent (app) | Achievement notifications sent (SMS) | Absences explained | About Me updates | Student Details updates | Pupil premium submissions (qualify)| Pupil premium submissions (not-qualify)| Behaviour views | Achievement views | Attendance views | Timetable views | Student Details views | About Me views | School Details views |

Tell me about it - took us a while to remember as well! Some other useful ones in this area: - Failed SMS numbers - Mobile text numbers that have failed 5 or more times (this actually now lists ones 3 or more times we think, basically those that are blocked and would show up on data issues) - Email addresses that have bounced 5 or more times (this actually now lists ones 3 or more times we think, basically those that are blocked and would show up on data issues) - Recipients who have tagged messages as SPAM

I'm pleased to tell you there is already a report to do that. Management > Management Reports > Search for "Undeliverable" This can be saved off as a CSV You will see that there is a flag called "Emails still sent to this address". Basically if it fails once or twice we will keep sending, after it fails for a third time we consider the e-mail address invalid and we wont attempt to send (it then shows up in your data issues as a blocked address). Hope that helps

Thanks for the feedback, what schools tell us they want is a big driver for our development plans. We don't like to talk about our future development plans too much until we are sure we are going to do it and when we are going to deliver it - we know how frustrating it is to just constantly hear "coming soon". We typically focus on interactions between home and school, rather than applications for use in the classroom. But as I say, we listen to what schools want so keep telling us what you need.

Hi all, Sorry for the slow reply, I was just making sure I had got my facts completely straight before posting: Yes! As Vik kindly confirmed on our behalf, we are bringing in the option to run the import using a scheduler. This will come roughly in line with the new desktop release for the Online Reporting product, sometime next month (March). In fact the one you asked for does exist already – BUT there are some situations you need to be aware of before using it so read below carefully before using it. You can use ParentSalutation manually by typing $ParentalSalutation$ into the message body. BUT 1) The Wildcard is looking at the data in SIMS. This could cause a problem because schools don’t necessarily update the data in SIMS after family events e.g. Divorce This can be resolved quite simply by running the routine to update parental salutation in SIMS: Routine>Student>Update Salutation/Addressee When the wildcard is used Schoolcomms will look at the updated salutation in SIMS However, the second problem is more complicated and the workaround is more involved for the school: 2) This is concerning non resident parents. Scenario- • Parent A and Parent B divorce • Parent A remarries to Person C • School uses $ParentalSalutation$ wildcard • Parent B will receive communication with Dear Mr and Mrs Person C This is likely to cause upset, which is why the school might want to avoid using the wildcard. The workaround for this would be to set non resident contacts as non prime (priority 2) in the import strategy, and set resident contacts to have priority 1. This will involve schools changing a large amount of their data in SIMS. This is why although the $ParentSalutation$ exists in Schoolcomms we don’t make it available in the drop down. Schoolcomms is about parental engagement – not parental angst! If there is ever anything that you want to do using Schoolcomms ring us up or email us and ask us if it can be done. Often (see above) it can be, and if it can’t we keep a wishlist. We can’t promise to do everything on the wishlist (or even half of it), but we do listen and we do have a budget for doing the most requested things. We send customer newsletters to every customer, unless they specifically opt out. If you aren’t getting them and want them then we must have missed your contact details somehow, using the button on the website will make sure you get back on the list. Hope that helps

We got some great feedback from BETT - overall really positive. People were really impressed with responsiveness of the app, especially given the awful WiFi available. Configuration screens are coming along: If you fiddle around with the configurations (and hit save) the changes impact all the users on web and in the app instantly which is pretty cool. We also like to get rid of pointless process steps, and make it easy to get going. So this will be the process for a Schoolcomms messaging or payments customer to start using Online Reporting: Go to the Online Reporting menu in Schoolcomms Click "Turn on Online Reporting" Decide if you want to turn anything off Hit save Congratulations your live. (We'll ring you up after 30 days and if you're happy with it then we'll ask you to pay for it )

We are working out the best option for what starts on, what can be switched off etc. It's complicated slightly because as a parent you might have children at different schools. We hadn't thought of that, but I can understand the reasoning, we'll quiz people at BETT to see how common this is. It's not challenging but not trivial either (e.g. due to push notifications for new events) we need to figure out the best way to do it. We have made it so you can switch on behaviour (or achievements) without having to show comments. Alternatively you could use the "only show data from X date forwards" option to only switch on behaviours after staff had been told to keep them clean. Hopefully those two options are sufficient. Worth remembering that parents are allowed to make a request for a full copy of the data you hold on them. There have been cases of businesses being sued based on comments left by call centre staff in customer records. The 0BP option we are going to do, which would hopefully keep the bullying victim record out (presume 0 points). But that would also keep your desirable 0BP events out. Can we persuade you to give them just 1 point? Discriminating based on behaviour type is probably a step too far for us in this first release, but we will quiz people at BETT and if it is a common need we will find a way to bring it in. Thanks everyone for your thoughts and feedback - really really useful.

With work on the App UI progressing well, we are starting to look the school administrator side. What configuration options would you need to make this work for your school? This is what we have come up with at the moment: • For each functionality area you will be able to switch it on or off for any of Parents, Students and Staff (if you switch it off it will just show a “not available” message when clicked on in the menu) • For behaviour and achievements you can set the earliest date that you want to show data (in case older data is less good, or inappropriate to show to parents) There is a “role” field and a number of points for behaviours. You can for example record someone as being a “witness” or “bystander” - not sure if schools would want to share this with parents/student? We thought that maybe an option to NOT share behaviours that received 0 points? There are some others that are probably going to have to come shortly after the first release to co-incide with some back-end changes we are making to our e-mail sending services: • Destination Email address for unexplained absence responses (if not using Schoolcomms messaging to manage attendance) • Destination Email address for Pupil Premium responses • Destination Email address for Student Details and About Me changes Are there any other settings you would like to see? If you wanted to try the product before buying it are there any other settings you would need?

Development has progressed really well over the Christmas/New Year break (our development team don't seem to believe in holidays). Below are a few of the latest screen shots from the app: (sorry for the weird student and school names, it's all test data) As you can see we have now got all the notifications working to show when there are new things to look at. We think this is really important - most parents aren't going to bother going in to check for updates every day, so using push notifications to alert them to when they should go and look is a nice use of the smartphone platform. On the back end - all the data is now syncing from SIMS (via our servers) successfully which is great. Not the sexiest part of the project, but vital to get robust and efficient. The IOS version is nearing completion, we have motored on with it to make sure we have something good to show at BETT. Pretty much just Payments to do (Payments is always hard work). We have this on most of our staff's phones and they are giving it a hammering. If anyone else wants to have a go, PM me with your email address and phone number and I will send you instructions on how to get the test version. Would be great to get your feedback.

Just a quick note to say that we have a new look (see the Forum banner) but that it doesn't impact at all on the Schoolcomms software - it's business as usual. We'll roll the new brand out across the software when there are updates - we don't want to create extra work for you!. If you're looking to come by our stand at Bett (B295) to say hello or try out our Online Reporting - expect to see the new logo. Best Kirsty

If you wanted to be a "parent" in one of our test schools we could probably do that by the end of next week. You would be able to download the IOS app and have a bit of a play at least. Because of the way Apple locks down the app store, apps in development are rolled out using a thing called TestFlight - basically we have to compile the individual test phones into the application. So if you wanted to do this we would need your email address, mobile phone number, and you would need to install TestFlight on your phone and give us your device ID. Anyone still interested can PM me. As we get further in to development of the website version we can do something easier. Alternatively you can wait until it's finished - we do free fully functional trials of all our products to any school any time

Development continues apace. Attached are a few timetable screens. It will show the current week and next week timetable. Students will see their own, parents will see their child(s). Staff will see their own as well. Due to the limited screen real estate it will be a scrollable list of days/sessions rather than the traditional table. It’s easier to reliably get a good look and feel on a list than a table across everything from an “ancient” Android phone to a modern Phablet. Interested to get people’s opinions on whether it’s valuable to show the session and room code (show in screen shot one, not in the second). We know we need to change the teacher name to not show full first name, unfortunately the name comes from the MIS as a single string which is a pain. Any other layout thoughts appreciated. The timetable data pulled through is for real from SIMS which is a nice milestone ticked off. The developers are giving all the Schoolcomms staff access to early versions through TestFlight soon. The plan is to have something reliable for showing off at BETT so that means getting all our staff to try and break it between now and then.

I'm afraid not at the moment - we would love to do Windows (and Blackberry), but we are developing for three platforms already (Web, IOS, Android), adding more really slows time to market and increases development, maintenance, and customer support cost. If/when the market share on Windows phone increases we'll do it. Much the same answer I am afraid. We are monogamous with SIMS at present due to market share considerations. It means we can offer a more functional product at a lower price and give better quality customer support than we otherwise could if we tried to be all things to all men.

If you use one of the systems talked about then the emails are sent from a different domain and IP and are registered with the ISPs so that they don't get blocked even with words like "iPad" in - which is probably being blocked because the whole world is marketing (and buying) tablets for Christmas.

Spam email is such a big issue globally for ISPs and just about everyone else who provides internet infrastructure that there are rafts of different checkpoints and hurdles that exist all along the route from you clicking send to it arriving in a parent's inbox. The key ones you are likely to face is the ISP you are sending from and the suppliers of your parent's email accounts (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, sky etc.). Your ISP may have checks in place to prevent large bulk sends. They would do this because they are concerned you might be part of a botnet (e.g. Grum botnet - Wikipedia). They will have complex heuristics in place to try and identify behaviour that looks like it might come from a botnet. Some ISPs are pretty brutal in how they deal with this. They care because they as an ISP may get blocked as a whole by other ISPs - which could pretty much put them out of business. The parent's ISP will have checks in place to try and weed out spam. Again the heuristics they use are typically very complex and will include lots of variables not looking at just the individual e-mail. One of the crucial things they will look at is DNS Blackhole Lists and DNS White lists - the most popular of which is The Spamhaus Project - Wikipedia. Many of the huge consumer ISPs also have their own lists that you can register with directly and even have proprietary encryption/authentication systems (e.g. yahoo DKIM) So given both of these it is really important that you don't repeatedly send to email addresses that are invalid, don't exist or where the recipient is marking you as SPAM. Your ISP (should...) be returning your emails if they are undeliverable - it's worth checking that they always do. Don't ignore these, you need to act on them. I'm afraid to say that once ISPs start to block your domain it is pretty hard work getting them to unblock you, but it can be done. Products such as ours and I expect the others listed will manage all this for you. E.g. automatically deal with bounced emails by showing you delivery status, providing reports of blocked accounts, and stopping sending to them until you confirm that the issue is resolved. Send parents an email? How hard can it be?

Hi there Yes you can send HTML emails. Give Owen our support team Manager a call and he'll talk you through it: 0844 445 7147. OR, if you want to wait until Bett, Owen will be on the stand all day on the Friday. Best Kirsty

Below is an early screenshot of the new main menu of our School Gateway app. This comes from the IOS emulator. We are developing on Android and IOS in parallel but progress is typically a bit faster on IOS (generally easier development environment). The Web/HTML development follows later. Once you have made the tough design decisions on how to fit everything into the screen real estate of the smart phone form factor it’s easier to expand up to full size desktop. The user interface is actually a relatively small proportion of total work, much of the work (and value!) is in the SIMS data extraction. So far that is progressing as expected as well. Much of the data we have worked with before on other projects, but behaviour and achievement data is totally new for us. (small question on this - do points totals typically get reset each academic year? term?) One of the big design challenges is how to deal with parents (or staff) with multiple children, potentially at different schools who have different functionality enabled. It’s a relatively small proportion of users, but we want a consistently good experience for all user scenarios. For smartphone we are currently taking the route of selecting a pupil first, then the functionality menu you see above following. With the extra space on web we are still weighing up whether to approach this differently.

This coming Spring we’ll be rolling out our new Online Reporting product, which will be fully integrated with both SIMS and our existing Messaging and Payments products. The Online Reporting product will draw attendance, behaviour, achievement, curriculum timetables, school and personal details from SIMS automatically and make it all available to parents, students and staff on their smartphone or on web. With real time notifications to inform parents when there is something new to look at and keep engagement high. And we are designing it such that a school can be up and running in about an hour, probably more like 15minutes for schools who already use our other products. We have now started development and if people are interested we would like over the next few months to give you an insight into our development process, show you our designs and get your feedback on how to make the product the best it can be. Tim

Cloud/SaaS Security is a big subject and this can’t be answered fully in a single post, but with respect to: How does this work, if the MIS is in the cloud, and all staff are using dual factor? How does the third party or automated system authenticate in a way that's dual factor? Two factor authentication applies more for human authentication – it is there to reduce the risk of people disclosing their password either by writing it down, just telling someone, or the original communication of the password being intercepted. Typically when two systems communicate (over the internet) they will not use two factor authentication for each individual communication. Two factor authentication will be used once to set up the relationship between the two services and this authentication persists indefinitely. For example: System A contains some data, System B wants to access System A to get that data. The owners of System B will ask System A for a Key/Certificate/Password – these are typically very long in comparison to human passwords to prevent brute force attacks and because there is no human data entry constraint. The owners of System A will generate the key and use a some form of two factor authentication to pass that key to the owners of System B (typically encrypt the keyfile, and call the owners of System B with the encryption password) The owners of System A will then use the key to authenticate when using the web services that System B provide to access the data. This model assumes that the owners of System A trust that the owners of System B are capable of storing the key securely. Generally this is a moot point – if they don’t trust they can hold the key securely they probably don’t trust them to hold the actual data securely and therefore won’t want to give them access in the first place. On top of this key exchange, there may then also be additional credentials required to access specific areas of data within System A. So for example if System A is a cloud MIS which holds data for multiple schools, the cloud MIS provider (or the school) may provide credentials to System B in order for System B to access that particular school’s data. This could be the school SIMS admin creating a username and password which is then provided to System B. The web services that System A provides to System B simply won’t require the second factor in the credentials to grant access (but they are requiring the key instead which has been securely delivered using two factor authentication).

That's correct. But just to clarify - AM Reports need to be uploaded after generating whereas Profile Reports are automatically uploaded to the Document Management server on generation. Hope that clarifies - good to be picky! Kirsty

When you have Schoolcomms Messaging, Schoolcomms appears on the Focus tab in SIMS. You click on that and then click on 'Send email'. You can then select any SIMS group (reg, year group etc) and then select the 'attach' option and select 'Assessement Manger Reports' or 'Student Profile Reports' and then you press send. The reports are taken direct from where there held in SIMS. So essentially you can send hundreds of reports in the same time that it takes to send one email.

Apologies... I just noticed that you'd mentioned us. Didn't mean to offend. You know where we are if you need us... I'll leave it there :-) Best Kirsty

If you're about to send reports, you maybe interested to know about a feature of our messaging launched over summer which allows you to bulk send student reports from SIMS, direct to parents by email... for free. No manual exporting, printing or posting.

Hi there – we’ve just started sponsoring the MIS Forum and noticed that we’ve been mentioned in this thread. If you’d like to compare your current service with what we provide, here are a few facts: Our software uses SIMS parent contact data and so there are no issues around collecting data all over again or maintaining multiple databases – or other people sending emails to parents. We answer over 90% of calls to our support line within 60 seconds and we target to answer emails within 2 hours. 95% of our customers rate our service as ‘great’. 97% of customers renew their licences with us. If you’d like to trial Schoolcomms, let me know and I’ll get one of the team to demo it to you over the phone - Messaging or Payments. You’re welcome to a 30 day free trial. If you want to speak to another school that uses Schoolcomms … I’m sure we can fix that up. If you like the system we can provide up to 6 extra free months transition to help you move from your existing contract. This is a great way to test the system and re-gain the confidence of staff before using it to send parents emails and texts. Kirsty