Graham_Cooper

Dear Edugeekers, Thanks for all your queries on this topic. Replacing SupportNet is, of course, a major undertaking, and for this community especially it was a useful and often consulted resource. We want My Account to be even better and bring some of the features that more modern (than SupportNet) websites can offer. It will be much easier to develop, enhance and improve than SupportNet in the future, and we needed to change. That said, like you all, I know change is a pain (or can be!) I speak as someone who only recently got to grips with the Microsoft ribbon. I resisted upgrading to Office 2013 for as long as possible and for a long time I couldn't make PowerPoint slides the way I had been doing for years. This is not meant to be a trite example - just a way of me saying 'I know where you are coming from'. Now I have been using My Account internally for a while I'm pretty impressed and can see the potential for future enhancements. So I apologise for the problems you have faced today and your feedback is helping us. Thank you. If you are having any technical issues you can email [email protected] or you can call our temporary support number 0800 130 3990, which is open Monday – Thursday 8:30 to 17:00 and Friday 8.30 to 16:30. We also have a 'bugs and suggestions' forum within My Account, where we can look into any issues you log and other users can also flag if it affects them. Some of you also raised some questions on the following areas: 1) File sharing area You can now share files with other users on the forums in the community area, so there shouldn’t be any loss in functionality. It’s not something we had much feedback about during Alpha or Beta testing. If there are specific files in the old file sharing area you need access to please let us know on the portal forums so we can look at the best way to provide easy access. 2) Change requests Change requests have been transferred over from SupportNet but their votes haven’t. Don’t worry - we will look at transferring the votes over. This shouldn’t be too difficult. 3) Knowledgebase We are looking at how we have applied security and permissions settings and we will work to resolve this as soon as we can so users have access to all the knowledgebase articles they need.

Unfortunately we had some 'teething' issues this morning that surfaced despite our best efforts in the Beta testing of My Account. These are now resolved. Thanks to everyone for their patience and perseverance.

@wpjon I'm not sure of your SIMS support arrangements, but we would welcome you getting in contact with our service desk so we might be able to assist. As this problem is of a highly technical nature it would help us to be able to discuss the system set-up and SIMS environment in another school that is having the same (or similar) symptoms to MaximusR. Please can I ask you to contact my colleague on the service desk - Simon Cronin: [email protected] We will certainly do our best to assist.

Matt - I'd love to, but everythiing is wrapped and in the final stages of deployment testing. I can imagine the response if I asked my colleagues in development to open everything up for a small change (but irritating I admit). I'm afraid it would put our release back a few days. It's a constant challenge knowing when to 'close the doors' and build the release version as there are always bits of polishing I'd like to do. Once we have agreed that we are at release candidate stage, only really big showstoppers are likley to interrupt the release process. As for customer options on the mapping tool - Google, Bing, etc... My gut feel is to pick one and use it, and Bing Maps seems as good as any. Unless users want a steetview feature to see a photo of the address!

Correct Matt - sorry I could have made that clearer. I'd need to go and check with my colleagues in the escalation fix team to see if you school is on the list Vik. I'll check it out and drop you an email.

Hello everyone, We're looking at this and I expect to have it addressed in the Summer release. Unfortunately we are code complete now for Spring and in the very final stages of release preparation in advance of next week (fingers crossed) Apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime. I have to admit I still type multimap into my browser and watch as it re-directs to Bing maps. I (wrongly) assumed the software link in SIMS would do the same. Thanks for raising this.

Vik, If you (or any school) is starting the week on any day other than an Monday then by definition a patch has been applied to allow this to happen (you can't achieve this in the SW without applying a patch). There is no patch number I can provide as these are issued as 'site specific' patches to schools that request this type of operation.

Hi Vik (and others). I can confirm at the moment we only see this as an issue for International Schools who want to, and have been given a patch to allow them to start the week on a day other than on Monday and the start date of the academic year has been amended. Also, in this circumstance, the problem does not arise if you begin the new academic year on the day after the previous one ends, regardless of what date that is. Additionally, if you accept the offered default start date then the problem does not arise. The issue arises if you overwrite the start of the next academic year with an earlier than suggested date, and specifically this date lies within the previous academic year. For example, suppose you set the current academic year to end on 31/08/12. The system would suggest you start the next one on 01/09/12. If a user decided to start this on, say, 31/08/12 (or earlier) then this would cause the problem described above - attendance and other data would be lost, not just for the overlapping dates, but potentially for the whole year. The forthcoming patch will check if BOTH the week-start day has been changed from the default day (Monday) AND if the next academic year does not start after the previous one ended. If these conditions are met, the software will copy the attendance data from the previous year and put it back correcting the problem. I'm not anticipating a large number of schools, especially in the UK, to have any problems as a result of the issue described in this thread.

Hello Edugeekers. Phil Neal, well known to many on this forum, has asked me to respond to some of the points raised on this thread. There are many interesting, and in my view balanced, comments about SIMS vs. Facility for assessment. As you would expect, we are bound to think that the SIMS assessment solution delivers more. That said, comments in here do help us reflect on what the Assessment solution we produce offers and ask ourselves if it could do more. Clearly, whilst schools are about many things, in my view they are principally involved in assessment and using this data to drive standards and inform learning through intervention, target setting, class grouping, whatever. We believe that the SIMS solution - that comprises Assessment, Analysis and now includes Discover offers the most comprehensive set of tools to help schools manage their assessment recording, analysis and reporting. But..... they can always be improved. and it seems we could learn some things from and should perhaps comment on the postings in this thread, which I think can be categorised as follows: 1. SIMS Assessment cannot meet the complex assessment tracking system we use, but XYZ software can. If this is true at all then I don't believe it holds for very many schools. The vast majority do this by using assessment tracking and target setting approaches that are rooted in use of prior attainment data from which targets are set and then regular recording of attainment occurs against the target. This latter check gives a suggestion of the progress of the child against a meaningful benchmark. There are many many ways in which schools all decide to 'skin this cat', but I have really yet to see one that cannot be managed in SIMS Assessment, but can be managed in a competitor MIS. Some schools use super-complex approaches in Excel which, frankly, would be difficult to mirror in any other software as they make use of obscure excel formulae - something I comment on in point 3 below 2. SIMS Assessment is too complex to set-up, not flexible enough and too hard to use. On set up, I think @Sivadam has the essence of what I would like to say here already written in one of his previous posts. That is, there is some short term effort required to create your assessment system in SIMS, but there is long term payoff if you think about it before jumping in, and, once built the system can run and run - as it does in many schools I visit. Setting up SIMS Aspects is few peoples favourite task, but by building them with some validation rules around them (Gradesets, Mark ranges etc) the potential for incorrect data entry by teachers is greatly removed and the ability to perform accurate analyses is massively enhanced. Many primary schools are provided with templates containing Aspects, formulae, analyses grids etc by their LA, so they have little or no work to do in setting up assessment tracking systems. We can improve this area and are looking at set-up Wizards and 'bulk create' tools for example. The flexibility point is an interesting one. Assessment Manger starts like Microsoft Word - a blank page. You can create what you want and record data however you like, the ultimate in flexibility. Comprehensive system utilities allow for bulk manipulation of the data when it has been entered. However, some of the comments above are valid. It is true that you cannot have more than 256 columns (time to do a better design!) and the number of If, Then, Else statements is limited. I'm aware of some schools who see this as a limitation, but not many. We'll take a look at that. Ease of use is, I think, related closely to the set-up and flexibility issue. We have recognised that for some time it has been a lot easier to get data into SIMS that extract and analyse it. This was one of the driving themes behind SIMS Discover. The release of Discover has given school managers (and teachers) a tool with which analysis and asking questions of data is straightforward. I have seen teachers with no knowledge of SIMS data interrogate SIMS and look for patterns and stories in the data. We hope and expect that in the future for assessment, most teachers will involve themselves with the SIMS Marksheet and the Discover tool, both of which are reasonably easy and intuitive to use. Clearly, there will always be an assessment or curriculum coordinator behind the scenes who does the set-up and, as I mentioned above, we need to look at how we make their job as easy as possible. 3. With SIMS Assessment I have to do most of my data analysis in Excel SIMS Assessment is not trying to compete with Excel. Right from the start we designed Assessment to be tightly integrated with Excel - through either the 'one click' export of a marksheet, to the two import from excel routines that allow matched and un-matched data to be imported easily. There are probably hundreds of formulae in Excel and some assessment and data people want to use them, so we make it easy if you do any data crunching in Excel to get the data out and back into SIMS. All that said, I don't believe that the vast majority of schools NEED to use excel for the main purposes of assessment data management and analysis although I do accept that there will be boundary cases in some schools where they want to run a particular calculation or formulae that SIMS assessment doesn't offer. There are pros and cons to each system, with, in my opinion more pros on the SIMS side. But, rather than create a 'points scoring' list of where I think SIMS scores over Facility (and other systems) I have focussed on some of the general points that are raised in this (now very long) thread about SIMS assessment which I hope help the debate. I have tried to give you as honest an appraisal as possible rather than tell you SIMS is the best and you should forget the rest. You wouldn't believe me anyway. If some of you have not taken a look at SIMS Assessment (or even other parts of SIMS) for a long time then please arrange to do so - as Phil mentions above we have an upcoming event in Birmingham, which we are holding on the morning of Tues 20th September specifically for primary schools. The session is aimed at those schools who are interested in evaluating SIMS as an MIS option and will be held at the Clarendon Suites. It will coincide with our regular user group for the 50+ primary schools already using SIMS in Birmingham; this will give schools the opportunity to meet and network with SIMS users to gain an understanding of how they use SIMS to successfully support school strategy. Birmingham primary schools also told us they keen to explore Assessment and FMS in more detail so, in addition to the morning session, we are holding two specialised sessions on the afternoon of Tues 20th September which will focus on these areas. Both existing SIMS users and non-SIMS users are welcome to stay for these sessions should they want to find out more. Thanks for reading this far - I expect my next post to be a lot shorter!