sefton

Have moved our 11 schools to Arbor over the last three years from a variety of suppliers. It would take something monumental to get me to move, as Sims NextGen is still a long way from a modern fully functional MIS, and the regular downtime I've seen on here from Bromcom over the last couple of years would just be unacceptable to our Board of Directors.

I've inherited this for a MAT and one of the purposes is to do IT asset management, but all that is recorded is one school from a few years ago. The only method I can see for importing assets is through a spreadsheet. Is anybody using this to manage their assets and how are they adding them to Every?

Got to say, every time I have a small issue with Arbor I come back to the start of the academic year and how Bromcom have constantly had issues at this point and I'm convinced I made the correct choice at procurement.

You can't do that, the data has to go to the responsible authority, either the LA for a grant maintained or a Multi-Academy Trust. The one I don't know is if a SAT closed, as their responsible body is the DFE.

I really wish there was a way to block users as Bromcom-PR is becoming bloody tedious.

I now have a migration booked from Ed:Gen to Sims with a go live date of July 1st, although the school will continue to use Ed:Gen to enter attendance and anything statutory until they end the term. For the migration I need to export CTF for all students for the past ten years, which is straightforward, and then produce a number of CSV files. My question is which module in Ed:Gen is used for reporting?

I got to bulletpoint 2 and my mind just rebelled at the banality of it.

I've migrated 10 schools, both secondary and primary, and can't say I've had any of these issues. I do know there was an issue with using Groupcall to migrate primaries which they pulled quite quickly and reverted to previous methods.

Type Live Agent in and you'll get put through to a person

Do you use the Live Chat on the support page?

All hail our Bromcom overlords.

I have all of our Arbor sites set for 2FA when not on their external facing ip.

I've got 11 schools and have been with them for 3 years now and this is the first serious outage I have had, just the one junior school though, so manageable.

Database cluster constantly restarting.

The school site is live now and I can log in from the Trust site to any school.

We've got one out of our eleven schools unavailable and I can't use the MAT site to log into any school site.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/mis-turf-war-firm-launches-4m-court-battle-with-rival/ Maybe they’ve decided there is more money in court actions than in maintaining a robust MIS.

The school already use Classcharts, plus all assessments are done on spreadsheets, they can do a register.

Sims is a last resort but at least the school still have a skill set in Sims and I used it for 20+years before we moved to Arbor. Plus if it is on Sims we have a migration pathway to Arbor, even if there is additional cost for the length of the Sims contract. Might all be moot though, I've reached out to ESS and nobody from sales has even bothered getting back to me.

We have a school being rebrokered to us in a few weeks, they currently have Iris Ed:Gen as their MIS, which they can barely use. Has anybody done a migration from Ed:Gen to another MIS? We use Arbor in our Trust but I would honestly move to Sims for a period of time if it got them off Ed:Gen.

I've done 9 migrations now, secondary and primary, and have found them quite straightforward if you do your data checking and clean up thoroughly, although some things are best left until the data is in Arbor as it is far easier to correct. Ensuring staff have the correct raining would be my other take away, not teachers as it straight forward for them but back office staff and attendance officers.

The Bromcom Blog competition somehow doesn’t strike me as a level playing field open to all.

The 3 Key products, Arbor, Integris and ScholarPack are less than 1% behind Sims now.

I'd expect Sims to make a bigger loss in the Summer census as a lot of three year contracts are coming to an end in March.

Setting up Power Bi with the Arbor Snowflake connector is really straight forward. Happy to have a chat online at some point.