RootsSchImp

Hi Priya, Could you share your login details to app.powerbi ? That way users can interact with a (non editable) web dashboard but you don't need to spring for a paid licence.

If money's super tight you could create a free powerBI account, publish there and give the powerbi login details to a set of users who are all authorised to see all the data published. Or you get your DM to publish the same BI desktop file to a group of users' free accounts. As @matt40k rightly points out tho - going down that route will soon cost you more in labour than a handful of pro licences as every change to the source file will need to be upload separately to those accounts

Hi @sclarke7 - looking at this issue I'd say there are 2 constraints on your timetabling - (1)the days which teachers have off and (2) the HoF's preference for who teaches what. It sounds to me like you've prioritised 1 over 2. Given that's the case I would assign teachers to all lessons yourself, swapping them freely when necessary to line up a desired slot with a free teacher. Once every class is scheduled the HoF can still move lessons around but they will only be able to do so respecting the days off of the part timers.

Hi @CyBeRkId2002 we're working on all the info necessary to do curriculum analysis and that will include the academic year/term dates. Currently the spec is written up for the MAT Vision data feed but I'll ask the devs if we can add the same table to the MIS OData feed. I had a look to see if a current MIS report could act as a stand in (you can feed Table Reports into BI using the Live Data Feed button). There isn't a perfect match, but if you use the domain student timetables you can pull out a list of dates when school is in session, which you'll still have to chop around a bit in BI, but it'd be easier than building up a calendar table from scratch. Ed

Each pbix file is a report with a dataset behind it. 3 options for managing the permissions: 1 (free, but more hassle for you) Create 3 separate free bi accounts (attd officer, beh officer, staffabs officer) Publish your three reports to their respective bi accounts and configure each to schedule refresh in each. In Bromcom Analysis, Power Bi Configuration choose 'indivdual accounts'. Now when your three users go to power bi viewer in Bromcom they'll see their report, provided they're logged into their app.poerbi. account in the background. Drawback here is it's obvs very difficult to scale beyond a couple of users with their own dash. 2 More expensive, more control. Get all your bi users pro accounts (cost varies but it's around 2-3 quid a month per user). You can then upload and manage reports in one place and share them with the users you want access. Note sharer and sharee both need a pro account. 3 free with workarounds. Publish all dashes that any bi user can view (probs the pupil data ones ) to a free account, configure Bromcom to use shared account and put that ac details in. Restrict access to mis users by hiding the power bi viewer for everyone except those authorised to see the pupil data. Have a separate bi account for staff/HR and view that outside the MIS (you can still schedule its refresh so it stays up-to-date ) Good luck Ed

Hi @MkII, In terms of the migrations that would be a three way process between you, us and schools. We've never done a whole LA at once, but we've done some pretty big MATs (Oasis has a few over 50 schs) so we can handle scale. In terms of what you'd get, you'd have two options - you could just buy the MIS for the schools, and choose to manage areas centrally with a common set of configurations or delegate to schools. You can make assessment templates in a central repository that individual schools download, ditto reports so potentially you can do a lot of your schools' data management for them...provided everyone follows a shared set of procedures. With this option though you'd still have to pull data out of each system independently for your central reporting, so... Option 2 is you also buy our data warehouse solution which automates data transfer from each school into a central store where you can report on it using our native tools or Power BI (*whispers* which is much better than our native tools). That's very broad strokes - obvs devil is in the detail, so I'd recommend getting someone to come and give you a presentation, even if you're not ready to go to tender, it can be useful to see what's out there and talk about common issues as a way of sharpening up your tender requirements. Ed

Not as obvious as I'd like it to be. More than one MAT has come to me with the objection that resources I've made for them in power BI "don't work", when the issue is they show that the underlying data is a mess. There's another lesson in this, a weakness of all MIS companies (us included) which is to imply you can have sophisticated, trust wide analysis without any effort. You need a data manager at mat level who understands how the analysis products work and how to keep their inputs straight. You just can't skimp having that expertise in house. If you try you'll just hop from product to product and none of them will work because garbage in: garbage out.

I work for Bromcom and I think migration is one of our strongest areas-the team is great. That said, the challenge is really about how you get your staff to use the new system so success to a large degree depends on you. The biggest mistake I see our sch adopters make is failing to make the most of the new system. Support staff get a couple of hours training and basically everyone tries to replicate exactly what they did in Sims. Your new MIS will be able to do different things and there will be great opportunities to make admin processes more efficient but you have to reassess those processes in light of the new tools you have available. Get someone with a good understanding of systems to go on all the module training courses so he/she can help the admin staff do this. Biggest mistake of Mats is not taking the opportunity to standardise subjects, assessments, names etc. Your data will be so much powerful if you can compare like for like across schools. Good luck with whatever system you choose. Ed

Other systems have parent apps-Bromcom does for sure. My advice would be to list everything you want your MIS to do, send that list to major suppliers (Bromcom, Scholarpack, Arbor, iSams, Progresso, Pupil Asset, Integris) and ask them to tell you what they can do for what price. It's worth the effort to find the right system.

Using FFT estimates as targets, although common, is a terrible idea. Here's why: The grade for each kid is the median achievement of a group with same prior attainment, gender and month of birth as that kid. Median as in lots of kids did better lots of kids did worse, even in the best schools. So you set these as your targets and some kids are below target, are they underachieving? Maybe, maybe not, lots of kids do worse than the median grade. It's far more likely though that kids who are 'on target' are the underachievers, because you need around 30% of them to *exceed* their target to match the schools you want to match. So you're tracking system tells you to focus on the wrong kids. This is true regardless of whether you use FFT top 50, 20 or 5. If you look at the different probabilities between these models you'll see that the median estimate (the grade erroneously used as a target) doesn't change that often between the three, the difference is the proportion of kids who beat it by one or two grades. A far better approach (if you need targets at all) is to have teachers set them and to use them as an indicator of teacher expectation. Although note for that for this to work you can't use them for performance management because if teachers are judged on whether they hit targets they set then they'll set them low.

Hi Everyone, As I understand it, to get SIMS data into Power BI you have to schedule reports to output to CSV/Excel and then use a gateway/sharepoint to make them BI data sources. Is that right/the only way? Is there a way of setting that up that's compliant with GDPR? Ed

If there's a massive pool of SQL Analysts willing to work in schools for a Data Manager's salary, how come I keep meeting DM's who struggle with formulas in Excel?

For me the interesting question for schools and MATs is not 'Can we use our MIS as a data warehouse and build our own reporting and analytics?' because if you find the right MIS you can. Even SIMS are joining the Power BI party albeit with question marks over the data security of using report outputs as data sources for BI. The real question is do you want to? Ie do you want to gamble that when your talented Data Manager who knows how to set it all up leaves, will you be able to replace him/her with someone with the skills to keep it going? What do yous think? Could a school/MAT be reasonably confident of hiring someone with this skill level?

It's a native feature - you can apply time or IP restrictions to roles or individual users in Bromcom

Agree 100% with other posters saying this requires a policy rather than a technical fix. One 'nudge' you could do though is to take right to view documents out of the regular teacher/admin roles and create a specific 'doc viewer' role with IP or time restrictions to ensure docs could only be viewed by users on site/in sch hours Ed

Not mentioning any names but there are some good products in the market for syncing data (attendance, assessment and staff data as well as exclusions) from SIMS to a MAT analysis tool. Unless money is seriously tight I would look at that because as soon as you make this work for exclusions your bosses are going to ask for another report and before you know it you'll have a monstrous family of exports to look after on every server.

When you're creating columns in Assessment Manager you can use N for next, enter to open dialogues and tab and space to select. If I had to add lots of formula columns for the same set of aspects/result set I would edit the resultset name to start with ! - that way N-Enter-tab-space-enter-N takes you through resultsets in under a second. I'd then use categories to get just the list of aspects I need (AM remembers them for the next column) so with one or two letters you can select the aspect you need. Sometimes you need alt+ letter - like I think finish is Alt-F It's a bit like learning to type - it doesn't speed you up initially (or even slows you down a bit) but once you get it down it really really speeds you up vs using the mouse.

As far as I know the drawback with Assembly is that they move your data in packets of 1500 records so if you've got big data volumes it can take a long time for your data to upload. That should only be a concern for biggish MATs though, a few schools should run overnight fine. Some people put a real premium on data being live live - but that's over rated in my view - your attendance/behaviour/attainment today is v similar to what it was yesterday.

I'm not going to dive deeply into whether you should switch MIS from SIMS (you should and it won't be as hard as you think). If you're deciding between a power bi gateway (which is the MS program that sits on a server and uploads data to the cloud) or extraction to an online data warehouse (groupcall or similar) that you query from BI I would recommend the latter because even if you're not in a MAT right now it's a fair bet you will be in the future and it will be easier in the long run to integrate other schools into one data warehouse than set them all up separately with their own set of reports and gateways. At Bromcom we initially fed BI from reports but thanks to input from @deshills and others we switched so there's a standard data feed for the MIS and for our MAT data warehouse.

Thanks guys - this did the trick for me too. Cheers Ed

HI Everyone, I'm trying to create an Individual Report in Assessment Manager but I'm getting an error "unable to download the student template file" - it's the first time in a while IRs have been created in this system. Does anyone know where the template should be saved and what's it's meant to be called? Can you recreate it manually - or is there another solution to this issue. I'd really appreciate any tips here - this one has me stumped! Ed

I agree AGILE (doing a bit at a time) is the best approach for product development, but in this case I don't see how you could move from SIMS7 to the cloud a step at a time. I think Capita are bricking it because they know a massive block of their market share is down to fear of switching in general and fear of having data in the cloud and once you bake those things into the equation and compare their cloud MIS to the others on the market it's going to be really hard to argue they're the best choice. Especially when really important fields of competition in the sector are quality of support and pace of development which for Capita...good luck with that. I feel bad for their tender writing team - lot of wasted hours on the roadmap for them.

What MIS are you using? In my experience most TT software is much of muchness (I've used Nova T6, Timetabler, Facility Scheduler and Bromcom eTimetable) so having some that makes it easy to export the MIS is a factor worth considering.

(imperfect) workaround rather than a fix but have you tried switching to CSV as the report output?

I don't understand why anyone would choose to adopt SIMS 8 - even if it's not buggier than a rotting log (which it might be) CES are glacially slow to innovate and their customer service is terrible. SIMS.net's USP is the network effect that everyone else uses it and the reliability of hosting it yourself but you lose both of those if you move to 8. Am I missing something? Where's the upside?