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I must mention at this point that the time taken for the individual reports to run in assessment in our case has nothing to do with the workstation/server specifications. This is a major fault that Capita need to fix. Considering I have tested these slow reports on a server with dual E5540 processors and 48GB of RAM this is far from the issue! The "problem" here is schools are reusing previous reports year on year and I assume by reusing these reports after various Capita SIMS upgrades where the data has been moved about, fields added etc is in fact more of a timeout issue. In most cases by completely recreating the report from scratch it runs in a matter of seconds. This is 100% a Capita issue and needs to be fixed. A look on SupportNet will show that loads of other people are having exactly the same issue with one comment being "we just have to put up with it". This is not good enough and something needs to be done about this issue. Many of our schools are very glad we are going out to tender for another MIS. Hopefully Phil Neal will listen and get someone in development to actually look into the issue rather than tell us "It shouldn't take that long". Correct, it shouldn't but it does for a lot of SIMS.NET users.

Hi jdoyle As a google search will see you are not alone in your opinion and if I were a parent I would also be concerned. However, that aside I have concern with any product that requires an extract of such data and sends it off to a datacentre in the sky. I bet there are a load of schools out there that if at any point were asked exactly where their data is held would not know. Its about being responsible with the data and 3rd party software providers are not usually very good at letting you know how "safe" it is. This is a major concern for schools without experienced ICT staff. Eric

Hi Mike Check out HKLM\Software\VivoSIMS SIMSpass and SIMSusername keys.... Glad to hear you are running it on a server My concerns were if the development team were so careless with the client I hate to think how "secure" the data is sent over the web! Eric

Hi Mike This might be a bit late but I would strongly advised against using this product! Its programming is careless and the SIMS username and password you feed it to connect is stored in clear text. Earlier versions stored the credentials in a text file and the more recient versions now store this in the registry where ALL users of the machine can access it. When security is so careless in the client application this would make one think how careless they are with the sensitive data they hold about children in your school and others! While I am not aware of any other products that do what this one does I do know for sure that every other product I have used to extract data from SIMS or any other MIS system either prompts the user for credentials on extract or stores the password in a encrypted database. I also believe Capita have just "approved" this product which just has to question the approval process. Do they fully test products for data security or do you become "approved" when you sign a large cheque? Anyway, rant over