Ecclesbury

That's fantastically helpful, thanks! Did Capita provide these xslt files or did you create them yourself/amend the default file? I'd been meaning to look at doing the same thing for the pupil timetable template but never got round to it.

Does anyone know if it is possible to email exam entry sheets to pupils from SIMS? We have InTouch and Schoolcomms but after a brief look I couldn't see any obviuos way to do it. I know exam results and timetables can be sent...but couldn't see entries. Thanks, Jonny.

There are a couple of options here. The quick and dirty way is to look in the 'Analysis' output option. This outputs a simple pivot table which can then be exported to Excel. Takes some fiddling sometimes to get exactly what you want, and doesn't really work for other people to run if you have to mess with the parameters each time. The longer method is to create a custom excel template to do what you want. If you're comfortable with VBA you can write a procedure that does the excel manipulation for you. It looks like this thread might be a good place to look.

You will only be able to find this out from SIMS if someone has done the 'Apply Timetable' routine (Tools>Academic Management>Apply Timetable.) Probably the easiest way to check this is to either open lesson monitor (Focus>Lesson Monitor>Take Register) and search for lessons on a given date in the future and you should see which week is applied based on the period name. An alternative is to open cover (Focus>school>Arrange Cover) and again select a future week and the TimeTable Day column should show you.

Has anyone ever tried supplying their own layout for a staff timetable when emailing them out? Just wanted to gauge whether it's worth the effort to investigate. The default layout is pretty awful!

Spot on, thanks! Don't know why I didn't try that myself (I tried /T and then gave up...I need to be more resilient!)

Does anyone know if you can tell commandreporter to log in as a trusted user rather than keying a username and password in directly? I'm looking at setting up a scheduled task to run a batch script and feel uncomfortable with the idea of a hard coded username/password. If it is possible to use a trusted user I'm hoping that if the script is run on the server using an AD account (managed service account?) then commandreporter will run using this user. Does that sound feasible or am I way off the mark?

That is where I fear I'm at with this to be honest. I might see what I can do as an intellectual exercise if I ever get the time but this issue comes up less frequently these days (and I've already blasted through the one that prompted it again!) I do love a find and replace, mind!

So in a SIMS individual report template it's common to have a table with a column with loads of assessment manager result fields. These are normally added using the Capita add in which generates what looks like a merge field. When you have a lot of these to add it can be very time consuming. My thought was to try and automatically generate these from Excel to save time. Initially I was trying to just generate the tags as a simple string, but I suspect this isn't going to work. VBA is a good thought. I suppose there will be a way to actually generate the whole word table (rather than an excel equivalent) and then copy this directly into the individual report template. At the moment I'm a bit lost with how the tag itself is generated though. I'll keep digging.

I'll be honest, Word is not my strong suit so this might be a silly question. Has anyone been able to construct assessment tags for individual reports in Excel? I had a little play but I'm afraid I don't quite understand exactly how the tags are constructed. The important bits between what I guess are custom formatting marks ( something like ^|^ ) are problematic. Would it even be possible to create something like this in excel that can be pasted into Word? I fear I already know the answer to that...

Bit late to this, but just to say that I'd be very interested. Also, how did I know about ANME???

In my experience because school environments are so dominated by teachers that atmosphere of being open about interviews extends to all staff. They will almost certainly ask for a reason if you are requesting leave so that they can decide if it is unpaid or paid leave. For that reason alone it's worth being open about it as an interview should be paid leave. On a personal level I have always found it better to be open about it because it can start a discussion about how they might convince you to stay! Of course I can't speak for your relationship with your school/manager/headteacher but a lot of it will be down to their character.

Just in case anyone hasn't seen it, all the info about linking SIMS to powerBI is here Unfortunately the school I'm at are very invested in google but I'm hearing rumblings that they might be trying to introduce some O365 stuff so I'm trying to learn it so I'm ready! I think it's definitely worth learning DAX, power query, M etc either way. It has fundamentally changed the way that I use Excel.

Got to agree with Roots. Learning to "type" assessment manager has saved me huge amounts of time over the years. I'm sure most people know this one, but just so my post has something useful CTRL-Q takes you to the SIMS homepage.

Unfortunately there isn't a simple way of doing this as it requires your timetabler to change the way that they maintain the timetable and can be very fiddly (but also very useful if done well) The short answer is to start using Maintenance Datasets (rather than Construction Datasets) which use something called Temporal Locks to protect future changes to the the timetable (such as your staff rotation). Best place to start with this is the 'Analysis and Other Functions in Nova' handbook in the SIMS documentation area. Chapter 7 is a good starting point. Another word of caution - if you use multi timetable you way find that even this method won't work. We have multi timetable where i am and although Capita insist that it should work we could never get the timetables to upload even with Capita's help.

Might there be an issue with either the connect.ini or SIMS.ini when logged in as the SLT member? I'll admit I don't really understand why there would be, but I've fixed odd issues like this before by copying over a clean version of the connect.ini and sims.ini. Jonny.

You're very welcome. That's pretty much why we do the job I suppose!

Ouch, that is an awkward one! I know this is not very helpful but I can't think of a way of doing this which wouldn't involve creating 2 sets of alternative curriculum classes (one on each TT) and only every assigning pupils to AC lessons in their own cycle. Obviously that would mean staff would have 2 registers. It seems that the trouble is that SIMS can't really handle the idea of a student being on 2 different cycles.

Hi Ian, In the classes sub report there is a 'Supervisors' sub report. That should give you all members of staff associated with the class. Jonny.

Thanks Cache, Yeah, School Details is the way to do it normally, but it doesn't allow free typing of the directory so ends up having to have a drive letter. Long story, but we actually have UNC paths for the EDIOUT and EDIHOLD directories so I know it's possible but the person who did it originally is long gone!

I'm not in the state sector now so I might be wrong, but from memory there is a 'Include in SWR' (or similar) flag in the staff record somewhere. Just make sure this flag is correctly assigned so that the member of staff isn't counted in the workforce return. I have certainly worked in a school in the past that had employment dates for PGCE students etc so it shouldn't cause a problem. Always worth checking with HR though in case it affects how they keep their single central record.

Does anyone know where the EDI directory paths are stored? Is there a config file somewhere? I want to edit them to be the full UNC path without a drive letter but this doesn't seem possible through the UI.

Indeed, I actually hesitated to post it as I realised how ridiculous it sounded while I was typing, but that is pretty much what they said!

Just to add another rumour nugget to this particular happy meal I heard from a direct/public source that Capita were miffed that they weren't being given the opportunity to present/host talks at BETT and were critical of the commercialisation of BETT itself.

This feels like the right time to share my story of a case I raised about a problem with Partnership XChange that was causing daily extra work for the office staff at 2 schools. A year and a half later I left the school and the case still hadn't been resolved! I sometimes wonder whether it is still open now... Can anyone beat that record for a critical open ticket?