DavePriorHLS

Outstanding - many thanks for your help Shivadam.

Folks, I can't find the answer to this question in the forum, so please forgive me as I'm sure it must have been asked before. How do I match up UCI numbers to UPNs? With the exam results looming I need to do this, and strangely I don't see a UCI field when designing a report. Where do I find this UCI number ? Many thanks for your help

Folks, In a couple of hours , I've performed a simple data extract (via reports) to an Access DB (hmm, copying data to an external DB, where did I get that idea from?), on which I can then use Excel Pivotcharts to provide rather nice pie-charts giving me what I want. No cost option too, apparently. Happy to supply to anyone who wants a copy.

So why does the legend not reflect this ? How could such a glaring error not be picked up immediately at the first Unit Testing, or FVT? Why would it result in inconsistent results ? Is it not possible to look at Behaviour Incidents as just that, and then filter them on Action Taken without having to key on Student (or doesn't Discover understand the SIMS concept of Focus ?). I contest the statement that looking at records using a primary key/focus other than student would lead to inconsistent results. If that is the case, then why can I do exactly that via Reports ? Well you wouild say that, wouldn't you ? QED:nono: Phil, I think this is degenerating. You are clearly not going to accept this flaw, and I really don't want any more flannel. I'll have a look at this in another 6 months, to see if the problems have been resolved, and in the meantime I will continue developing my own (consistent) solution. So there nur.

Don't tempt me !

Hi Matt, lottery odds are only 14 million to 1 against More seriously. I raised the post for several reasons. 1) To check that it's not just me getting precious 2) To raise awareness of the poor support offered by Capita. There is a stonewall denial that anything needs to be done to fix the product. 3) I agree with what you say about adopting new products (bleeding edge we used to call it) but Discover has been around for over 12 months now, I'm not sure it qualifies as new any more. 4) To gauge other people's experience and learn from that 5) To offer Capita an opportunity to discuss one on one, rather than through the red tape of helpdesk procedures, 3rd parties and so on. I'm not the most experienced boke in the world, and although I've been involved in some stuff in my time, I'm always looking to learn and develop. And as far as someone else stepping into this niche, I don't think it's allowed to happen. Obviously I could be wrong. Anyway, time for me to step off my soap-box and stop wasting your time !

Teejay, I have to admit I agree with you. Discover isn't fully tested and robust enough to be released. I think that this is supported by the fact that I found something wrong within an hour of using it. I don't mean this as a damning condemnation of the product, but simply as a means of altering the view of CAPITA support that nothing can possibly be wrong. Matt - you're playing with words. The fact that the product is already paid for doesn't mean it's ok for it to be flaky. I don't think we're talking about something being idiot proof, simply something that does as it says on the tin. Discover clearly doesn't do this. And do you mean that the marketing material from CAPITA is deliberately misleading ? A fairly damning comment to make in public forum - on what do you base this ? Regarding the problem, since I didn't actually come down with last night's rain, my LA was of course my first point of call. A very able and helpful lady there, who ended up sharing my frustration at the disappointing answers offered by support within CAPITA. Anyone who says that it's not the graph that's wrong, it's the legend has more neck than I ! I don't want this to degenerate into a slanging match, as that won't benefit anyone. Matt please accept that perhaps I've been around this particular block once or twice before, having spent significant time in a multi-national software supplier, so I do know a little about this situation.

Guess I'm going to have to conclude that this is simply an example of Sole supplier to UK schools exploiting a monopoly position, foisting untested applications on schools that have no power of recourse. A political issue that goes far beyond common honesty. Add this to the long list of ignored faults.

Hi. And thanks for your help. My problem is that once I went to CAPITA, I was given the answer which I gave in my initial post, which I have to admit I found a little unhelpful. I couldn't comment on the impact that Discover might have, I don't know enough about the other reporting systems used around the UK, but I do agree that it could be a great product once the wrinkles get ironed out. That's why I find it frustrating when the wrinkles appear to be ignored rather than fixed.

Hi Matt - thanks for that. I attended an Overview Course a little while ago. I'm not sure how a course would help here ?

Thanks Phil, but that tells me the number of students that had C3 Detentions. I want to know the number of times students were given C3 Detentions as a consequence of their actions. My fault for not being clear - sorry.

Hi all, New user to Discover, and I'm delighted to see that the Clive Sinclair philosophy towards software development lives on. Indeed, it's great to see that CAPITA have a sense of humour, in naming their "product" Discover, since that's clearly what we have to do, discover what's wrong with it. Forgive the puerile humour, but I'm a little fed up with being fed nonsense from CAPITA every time I find gaping holes in the software. For instance: (see attachment for a screen-scrape) Get the graphs Behaviour Incidents by Action Taken, and Behaviour Incidents by Registration Group on the canvas. The former shows all behaviour incidents for the current academic year, categorised by Action Taken. Quite useful. The latter shows all behaviour incidents for the current academic year, but categorised by Tutor Group. Also vey useful, particularly for Tutors. Graphs are produced extremely quickly and easily. So far, an excellent product. One brilliant function is being able to drag one part of a graph over another part, and create one's own filter. So it would be great to be able to see how many students had a behaviour incident that resulted in a C3 detention being set in a particular tutor group, so I drag the C3 Detention data point (is that the correct term?) from the former graph, and drop it on the latter. So now, I would expect that this would show me Behaviour Incidents that resulted in a C3 Detention being set, categorised by Tutor Group. This would be brilliant as it's so quick and easy to do.The legend now changes to say Behaviour Incidents [filtered byC3 Detention 45 mins (Action)], which supports all this. Excellent. No. What this apparently shows is all behaviour incidents for all actions taken for students in tutor groups who have been involved with a behaviour incident with action taken C3 Detention. Apparently the graph is not filtering Behaviour Incidents, it's filtering group's of students. (forgive the incorrect use of the apostrophe, but I wouldn't want to misquote CAPITA). I am told that the fault isn't with the graph filtering, as I mistakenly thought (silly me, how could I come to such a preposterous conclusion?). The fault lies with the automated generation of the legend, and this will be fixed in a future release ("fixed in the next release" I think was first used by the Eqyptians when they were developing the pyramids). I have ordered a 60" wide screen monitor, to enable the snappy all behaviour incidents for all actions taken for students in tutor groups who have been involved with a behaviour incident with action taken C3 Detention legend to be clearly displayed, and await the next release with interest. When I have a few moments over half-term, I'm going to look at the other graphs, to see if I can stretch the inventive capabilities of the CAPITA helpdesk. Or is it just me ? Behaviour Management Problem.docx

Sivadam, You'll understand my frustration and disappointment I'm sure. You're saying that it is very unlikely that this can be fixed within the next 12 months, and more likely 2 year hence ? Also my apologies. I've read back through this thread and my assumption was that you work for CAPITA - you clearly seem to know a lot about how they work. It really would appear that I'm taking the wrong route here, please help me out. A problem exists within SIMS, where anyone can delete Detention records, without any trace. I assume that the same is true of Behaviour records. Clearly this must be fixed (is not a Bullying Log a statutory requirement - help me with this please). Furthermore, this data is required for various (sometime sensitive) situations, and must be reliable. Change Requests appear to be to change functionality or add specific function, or in some other way request a change in design. Clearly I cannot know enough about SIMS to know which part of the design is at fault, so clearly the CR process isn't what I need. So what do I do please ? Phil - I don't know if you are still following this thread, but can you shed any light ? Once again, many thanks all for your help in this.

Sivadam, Many thanks for this. I'm very aware that, although I've spent a number of years in IT, I am new to the schools area and obviously don't have your experience. It looks like have arrived at a solution: Delete/Define Detentions needs to be set up as a separate permissions group, so that schools can control this as they see fit. How do we make this happen ?

Hi Sivadam. Sorry to hear that you would vote against the CR, I'm not sure I understand why. We have the scenario that you outline. The teachers tell me they have enough to do teaching, and expect the system to be run by admin staff (which I have to say I do agree with - their core business is teaching after all). The teaching staff here do not want to learn how to set up and maintain detentions. They don't want to have to administer these detentions and sort out the inherent niggly little problems. They simply want to put pupils into detention when it is deserved. We're looking to roll out subject detentions, and "ad-hoc" detentions such as break and lunchtime in the coming academic year, and plan to handle it in a particular way to minimise the impact on the teaching staff. Allow me to ask you to reconsider. Should my CR be acted upon, it would be a simple matter to allow your scenario, thus this would allow everyone to be happy. Many thanks