Tiger

Garry, I sympathise with you but you are not comparing like with like. Does Nikon operate in a market with one supplier having 80% of the market? The MIS Market is far from true open/free market - see Becta's 2005 report and recent circular to Directors of Children Services in LAs as per recent thread in: Becta's School MIS & Value for Money follow up! With such a market, no publication would want to invest resources in such review of MIS software on the market or companies to innovate or invest! Agree??

ntm1275 , Very interesting account. ntm1275, are you able to tell us which LA this relates to? Does your LA apply "top slicing" funds for support & maintenance for MIS chosen by LA (Serco in your case). Schools righly complain about "top slicing" funds. Top slicing means schools pay twice for maintenenace and support, first of all for LA chosen MIS (in your case for Serco which school does not use) and then one that the school chooses (Capita - in your example). How injustice this must be!! It would be an unfair incentive for the school to stick to LA choice for such fundemental facility running a school. To decide to pay £33,000 (before VAT) for a new MIS means the school feels strong enough for their choice to invest such amount of money!

Have you checked it out? Any good?

I did not mean to unleash any frustrations or anger here .... Just on two points: Zoom7000: "SIMS on an iPod? Why? Just why? " 1. For PE Teachers. See many postings on trying to get PE teachers to take registers on smart-phones and others. This claims 'zero client installation'! 2. Accessing SIMS.Net via web browser on laptops/PCs/iMACs for teachers: This is also discussed in many thread how browser is a 'must' for low cost of ownership and above all rolling out client side installation. It will be also intersting to see how well it will work on netbooks.

You may find what you are looking for at "www.TeachersWebFolder,com" - Teacher's Web Folder Yes? Has anyone had any experience of it??

I've just come across this entry under different thread - it is 'top slicing' in a different disguise!!!

Having seen this thread and how problems seems to be taken that it is just upgrading client stations as being the only issue as the 'cost of ownership' of THICK CLIENT SOFTWARE. Far from it! There plenty discussion on this on this under different thread, see Browser based MIS etc.. - so I won't dwell on it here. However what is interesting here is the schools choice and whether 'top slicing' is denying schools the basic decision whether to go for one MIS or other. Surely there should be a mechanism for a school to 'opt out' from top slicing and get their appropriate funds to be able to go for their choice of MIS. Some LAs seems to be giving this option - it should all LAs. Yes?

Interesting ... A matter of interest which VLE did LA go with and which VLE did you choose?

This sounds fair! Which LA is this then? It should be a model to the others!

Interesting what you said - we had the same reservation and questioned Bromcom on it. Bromcom says OFT's arrangement with Capita on Voluntary Assurance, guarantees read/write access to all Capita database and data access objects and gave us URL for OFT decision - http://www.bromcom.com/News/press/pdf/020503_Press.pdf It appears that Bromcom has done their homework here well! I will leave it to Bromcom spokeperson to fill in if I got anything wrong. Our trial is based on SIMS Data being displayed on MyChilAtSchool parent portal for lesson by lesson Attendance, Assessment Manager Data and Conduct Log for behaviour. By the way at this point we will be using Bromcom parent portal for parents viewing student data - hence writing back to SIMS does not come into it. Trial starts after half-term. I will keep the forum informed.

Have used Bromcom system yourself? How about MyChildAtSchool -are you planning to us it? I heard that it best looking piece of software of its type. I tried the demo - it appears as good as I heard. We are planning a trial soon.

It sounds as if Bromcom the only 'completely web-based' MIS - is this right? Any comment anyone?

Alumwell, Is your comment in reference to Capita or Tasc or both? Please expand on your experience - it sounds as if we should learn something here. Thanks in advance.

The problem is you still need PE Teachers with 3 hands to operate any form/size of laptop whether 9 inch screen or 14 inch. Hence an effective solution naturally is around Pocket-PC/ hand-helds - a mobile device for on-the-move / mobile applictions, so long as you get the right software to go with it too!

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