emma_24_uk

I went to the Serco 'Progresso' demo yesterday and was pleased to hear confirmation from serco on the future of facility finance which as GregJ states above removes any need for us to look at other MIS systems at all... Progresso seems to be the way forwards with data being made available to leadership automatically as and when its needed - far better than anything Ive seen in discover for example... I wait in anticipation to see more in the Autumn term....

From my experience of using facilty and having a friend who uses sims, it is clear that several features in facility assessment are not available in sims... there may be far more features than there were a few years ago but sims still misses some functions I can see many schools need.

Glad to hear that - have you had that fact confirmed by serco? Does anyone know what Serco are doing about the finance solution used by almost all Birmingham schools - there have been some rumours that it may not exist, but other people are saying its going to continue and be changed to meet academy financial requirements?

Thanks for the replies = Ill be really interested to see what progresso can do at the event on the 12th and understand that link2ict will be hosting a sims event in the autumn term so will be good to compare features and total cost etc. I guess with the new hosted progresso there wont be a need for an extra parental access component at all tho? - anyone know?

Thats partly my concern - we use eportal really intensivley and learning gateway doesnt seem very user friendly and why pay extra for something we currently get included in our costs.. Is sims as locked down as im under the impression it is? last time I looked we could do far more on assessment in facility and its easier to integrate with internal systems without paying an additional licence for access to our own data? It seems that on a pricing front capita are offering a range of prices depending upon who you are...

Why does it matter who holds the licence - It doesnt cost £1000's more as its the same licence for the same software... Rip OFF!... I can understand if we wanted to go to the supplier for support that there would be an additional cost, but we wouldnt !

We are certainly going to the Serco 'Progreso' demonstration on 12th July at Birmingham FC and will be looking with interest at this as the way forwards. SIMS seems really expensive to move to as the quote a colleague has received doesnt include any of the migration costs or more than the most basic training. I would think that moving more than the basic CTF transfer which is quoted for would not only be very time consuming but could also cost ££££ and probably not result in a complete data set.... nightmare! As we use really complicated assessment structures I will be interested to see if serco are able to migrate all the data and structures straight into their new system as re-creating them in SIMS for example would be really time consuming (a friend uses assessment manager and I know!!).. Just as a thought, are Link2ict offering us the opportunity to look at other systems, or are we being sold SIMS due to the Capita ownership... it certainly seems that capita are trying to get schools to sign up now... are they worried about the competition? We are not yet looking at being an academy but its probably on the horizon - why do we have to re-licence at all when the only difference is a change of legal status - we dont want anything else from the mis supplier - just a new licence and the support we have now! - seems like the big boys see this as a licence to print money