HannahBuist

We have a handful of schools starting to use Agora and I was hoping to speak to someone about how they support it at LA level? If anyone would be happy for me to PM them please let me know, as I have a few questions :-) Thanks

No joy *bangs head on desk*

^ This is the technician from the school.

Hello all I have a secondary school who have a new SIMS server. They have installed SOLUS3 and have it up and running successfully. However, they are unable to install the SOLUS3 agent on workstations through the UI. They have managed to do this successfully in the past. When selecting a workstation from their network, and attempting to install the agent, they get the error access denied to the remote machine. Firewall is not the issue, nor group policy settings (these have been checked). No system log or installer log are created on the workstation in question. Technician can connect to the machine via \\\c$ with the same credentials they are using in the SOLUS3 UI. They have tried local and domain admin accounts. They are able to install the agent manually, but as a big secondary school this will take a considerable amount of time, and as it has worked for them in the past they are keen to get the agent installed through the SOLUS3 UI. I have it logged with capita but have had nothing other than firewall/group policy advice as yet and the school are keen to get on. Has anyone else experienced this? Any thoughts? Thanks

Hello I know that Capita have the technical roadmap, which shows the operating systems that SIMS will and won't work on (in theory). However, I am currently trying to look into what devices and operating systems SIMS can work on so we are better prepared to advise schools that buy various kit. I'd be really grateful to know experiences of which devices/OS do/don't work well. Alternatively, if anyone knows if such a document already exists that will give me some answers, I'd be grateful for that as well! Thank you all

Thanks Matt40k Turns out initially it was an issue with the sims.ini showing the wrong sims directory location. Changed this, and sent a new sims.ini to all devices through SOLUS3. Now the sims.inis show correctly, and the issue has been resolved on all but 3 workstations. The issue appears to be that Options and Nova are defaulting to look at C:\Program Files rather than Z:\(relevant folder) as defined in the sims.ini. The new sims.ini resolved this on all other workstations but there's obviously something going on with these three.....

Hello all I consider myself relatively good with SOLUS3 - I have a centrally managed system which I use to upgrade around 200 primary schools. Today I ran an upgrade at a secondary school, with their own SOLUS3 Deployment Server, their first upgrade using SOLUS3. Everything looks fine in their deployment environment - correct filepaths for file server and workstation definitions, workstation settings are correct. The upgrade itself ran fine. However, since running, all users on all workstations are reporting the following issues: * When going to Reports - Lesson Monitor - Letters - Print Letters all users get the error 'Cannot create directory C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net\Attend\Letters\Temp' * When trying to open Options users just see a blank screen. I suspect there will be more, as yet unreported, issues as I guess this all links back to one issue. Logged a call with Capita but no response as yet. I've never had this issue with the primaries. Anyone here got any ideas?

I had this some time ago, and although it was a bit of a faff I'm sure I found that if I created a nested if then else for if 1 = 1 then blank (selecting no colour) and apply that to the column in question (through Also colour this column), calculating will remove the colour. That formula column can then be deleted. Hopefully that should successfully get rid of your colour. If it doesn't, it must be picking up a colour from another template.

I upgrade Discover in all my schools using command lines - I don't do any manual upgrading for any part of the process. Apologies as some of this is duplicated from above but it's easier to just put the whole thing. First I run the following on the server (just replace any instance names/database names as necessary): cd D:\Netapps\SIMS\setups\Discover\Setups\ServerSetupFiles Discover.Setup.Server.Console --DeployDatabase --SQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" --DATABASENAME="Discover" --TRUSTEDCONNECTION=1 cd D:\Netapps\SIMS\setups\Discover\Setups\ServerSetupFiles\Server SIMSDiscoverServer.msi /quiet /log %TEMP%\DiscoverServer.log INSTALLDIR="D:\Program Files\SIMS\Discover Services" SQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" DATABASENAME="Discover" SIMSSQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" SIMSDATABASENAME="sims" TRUSTEDCONNECTION=1 DATATRANSFERSCHEDULEDTASKTIME="00:00:00" USERSYNCSCHEDULEDTASKTIME="00:24:00" DATATRANSFERSERVICEACCOUNT="NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService" GROUPSYNCSERVICEACCOUNT="NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService" cd D:\Netapps\SIMS\setups\Discover\Setups SIMSDiscoverClient.msi /quiet /l %TEMP%\DiscoverClient.log INSTALLDIR="D:\Program Files\SIMS\DiscoverClient" SQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" DATABASENAME="Discover" SIMSSQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" SIMSDATABASENAME="sims" Then the following on any workstations/terminal servers (first copying files to a local drive as I find the .msi doesn't run well from a network drive via cmd): cd D:\Netapps\SIMS\setups\Discover\Setups SIMSDiscoverClient.msi /quiet /l %TEMP%\DiscoverClient.log INSTALLDIR="D:\Program Files\SIMS\DiscoverClient" SQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" DATABASENAME="Discover" SIMSSQLSERVER="SIMSINSTANCENAME" SIMSDATABASENAME="sims" No need for any manual upgrades at all :-)

There is/was some gubbins on Supportnet that guided you through setting up to have two instances of Discover on one machine. It's not pretty though, and I found the services didn't work particularly well with it. But I'm sure there are people using it successfully in their training environments. I used it for a time, but tbh with limited success and I soon gave up and we moved to independent images for our secondary and primary courses, with one instance of Discover on each.

We use the Hosted BETA. Quick email to User Acceptance Testing at Capita and they provide details on how to log on to it and the credentials to use.

I push it out from an LA Deployment Service. So I expect it to be slow - but I'm not exactly demanding ridiculous work from it which makes it a bit frustrating. Yeah I love how you have to backdate so far. At least now I'm on this side of it I know what I'm moaning about and can empathise with others - whereas before I started I just got nervous of it. Now I can get cross about it!

Well that's interesting if it is a faulty report - I was hoping that the system taking 8 hours to upgrade was due to there being a lot of 'downtime' with it being stopped, but if it wasn't really stopped and it still took 8 hours for 28 schools? Ouch. Thanks for the tip about getting rid of the rollbacks though - that will come in handy to sort out some of my 'stuck' deployments and hopefully tidy up my now very messy deployment history screen! I should've known better really - after successfully upgrading 3 schools for both SIMS .net and Discover so quickly I thought this was going to be straightforward. No Christmas miracles here!!

I tested the use of SOLUS3 for upgrades for the Summer release of SIMS .net with 3 schools. All upgraded fine. Tested them again for Autumn. Again all fine. Upgraded Discover on these schools. All fine. Then I got excited, and set up a deployment plan covering 28 schools for the Autumn release of SIMS. Exciting. And guess what happened? Failed and rollback. That's ok, I can redeploy. So I did, and it took 8 hours last night to upgrade 24 of those machines. I've set a timeout, which it seemed to ignore. The main problem I seem to be facing is the lovely SOLUS3 Deployment Service seems to have stopped error. No it hasn't, it's definitely running. And I've rebooted about a hundred times, and I still get the same error. It spends more time with that error up than not. What I'd like to know is - has anyone else had this problem when deploying? Is there anything I should be checking to stop this error coming up? To say I've had enough is putting it mildly. And don't even get me started on the fact that you can't cancel a deployment once it's verifying the deployment plan, or stuck part way through a deployment but isn't doing anything. That one's been clogging up my system all day..... So much for the festive spirit! If anyone has any suggestions for what I can try to get rid of this intermittent message I'd be very grateful. I have 80 schools to upgrade by Friday and I don't fancy spending my whole Christmas watching the new blue screen of death.......

I've got the same problem at one of my schools - I'm so glad I'm not the only one! If I take a copy of the data and load in the office it works fine. Call logged with Capita.....

Ok - let me be more specific: Hurrah for me as I have only released the upgrade to 1 school, not 240+, and now I don't have to face a series of support issues regarding the Assessment issue that for me does seem to be a rather important issue as I have a large number of schools using Assessment Manager. Not hurrah for those of you in the same position as you. Agreed a withdrawal is a bit extreme (and a major issue for those schools who have already begun deployment), but for my reasons I stand by my 'hurrah', for me at least.

Hurrah!

Apparently so :-( Although I haven't heard back from my support call yet so fingers crossed I get a different answer! I foresee many support calls on this......

Nothing back from my logged call yet, but Chris Sherwood from Capita has updated my forum post with the following: I am afraid that it cannot be patched. We are working on a fix for the Summer release. oh happy days.

With a business analyst at Capita.....will keep this thread posted!

I've logged it with Capita this morning so watch this space.

Haven't logged a call yet but it is on the forums. Lots of people reporting the same thing but no patch or further info as yet....

That was me. I've been doing Spring release testing on Green Abbey and Water's Edge and all seems ok so far (touch wood) with the exception of this deleting a result issue. When highlighting a cell containing a result (not double-clicking to get the cursor) and pressing delete, rather than blanking out the cell it removes the pupil from the marksheet. If you close and re-open the marksheet the child reappears. Where this causes a problem is if you have calculations on a marksheet. If you remove a pupil from the marksheet, then press calculate (or click save with the calculate on save functionality selected) I get a 'there is no position at row XX' error and get thrown out of SIMS .net. So it's something to do with the system trying to calculate on a row that has since been removed.