SpreadsheetJockey

We suspend lessons and use the 'intervention' area to create some one-off temporary groups usually. Then teachers can mark registers as usual.

Anyone with "Staff: User Details: Administer" or "School: General Admin: Administer" permissions will get those emails, which is often a ridiculous number of people if you are using Arbor's default business roles. I think Arbor has only consulted senior teaching staff when it comes to setting default permissions, because roles like 'Senior Management Team' can access and break anything they like, but somehow 'ICT manager' does not come out of the box with full admin access... Go to School > Users & Security > Access Control > Permissions and find the permission "Staff Profile: User Details: Administer" - click into it. Then, down the left hand side you will have 'Overview' selected. Go down to the permission's 'Users' instead. Review if those people actually need this permission group. Repeat steps for the 'School: General Admin: Administer' permission. After review, consider amending some of your business roles to remove this permission from the role. 'School: General Admin: Administer' is usually the problem - for us it was assigned to everyone from the headteacher down to admin assistants, and if you look at the overview for a rundown of what the permission is for, it may be that not everyone needs it.

Hi - you can disable their ability to see specific student details via Students > Parents & Guardians > Parent Portal Settings. If you scroll down the settings, there is a student details bit in which you could choose not to show medical details at all (and various other parts). Having it set to not auto-approve is the way though. The parent requests a change but you don't have to approve it. Depends on whether you have the staff to administrate that though, I suppose.

Arbor has it's own issues - rather than crash and burn like Bromcom, it just slows down to a crawl in terms of processing. For example, when it's overloaded like at this time of year, timetable changes like room swaps (which are endless in September) take hours to show up in the system and sometimes edits fail entirely and there is no way to know at all... until you have 30 Year 9s queued at the wrong room, or a teacher running around in a different part of the building with no idea where their class is. It is a safeguarding nightmare until things settle down. Both databases are still better than SIMS though, by a mile.

Well I just tried it, and closing the tab and opening a new one kept the session, but closing the browser and re-opening required a new sign-in.

Just to update this forum, in fair play, the Arbor bot replies are far better now, and much less... manic. They also state they are a bot now (more or less), which makes it much less frustrating because it doesn't feel like a support person didn't bother to read your email properly. So, nice job Arbor. I would still rather have a real person, but I can see it would be cost saving to try to bounce as many basic query tickets as possible before a real person gets involved.

I will just reiterate a previous post and say that I am a power user of these various MIS systems, and have dealt extensively with both Bromcom and Arbor, and there really is not a whole lot between them. They both have strengths and weaknesses. There is certainly not enough of a difference in the products to warrant such a crazy marketplace and schools can function perfectly adequately with either. If you are in the middle of trying to decide between the two, you won't feel you've made the wrong choice with either one in my opinion. And probably some of the other systems are just as good, frankly. Company representatives seem very dramatic about MIS systems at the moment. Don't they know we're all tired and underpaid? Exhausting.

Is there, or will there be, a dark mode? (please - my eyes!)

I suppose I should be happy that the AI is so very enthused by answering support tickets rather than planning a Skynet-like takeover...

Any chance you could stop support being so over the top like "Gosh I am absolutely thrilled to be answering your ticket today" - I know it probably makes me a bitter old user but it is a recent deeply annoying addition to support responses, and makes me assume AI is being used for first replies. To be fair to you though, at least it's a fast response!

Speaking as a data person who has to use the product everyday, and as someone who has experienced CMIS, SIMS, Bromcom and Arbor in various places, I can assure you that both products are equally good and bad in their own ways. However, both are better than SIMS just for being modern systems. Arbor is more developed for Primary and is working on it's secondary product apace, although it is significantly behind in areas like assessment (to the extent that we are back to mailmerges in Word...). Bromcom is better for secondary, with a lot more scope for customisation in assessment, behaviour etc. however it has some optimisation problems and can be very slow, and the helpdesk can be very hit and miss, with responses ranging from 10 minutes after you put the ticket in, to months later with no response. To be more positive though, both are better than SIMS in overall experience, and easy to use for the average teacher. It is the back office staff who will be affected most in both good and bad ways. I would still move to either system (or any other) rather than stay on SIMS which is well-worn with good documentation (usually) but so very outdated at this point.

Oh I'd absolutely agree with you from a technical standpoint, assuming SIMS these days is better at this stuff than it was previously. But if its going to take weeks of sifting staff, student and contact data, then just spend an hour doing it in Arbor instead.

Arbor has a really straight forward data retention area for student and staff records - if I were you I would be leaving the data as is, and then dealing with it once it gets into Arbor. The policy is set in Arbor at the moment, but I hear they are developing this area at the moment (and hopefully this will allow us to set a custom data retention schedule rather than stick to a generic one).

Well, The Key Group have, who also own Arbor amongst other things. See here: https://thekeygroup.com/news-insights/the-key-group-acquires-timetabler-extending-its-market-leading-offering-to-schools-and-mats

I have experienced SIMS, Bromcom and Arbor. In my opinion, Bromcom is still the superior product for secondary schools as Arbor is quite basic and/or rigid in key areas (like assessment, behaviour, timetabling, exams). However, I still support Arbor as the momentum for change seems to be strong, the support tickets are picked up quickly, and the transitional support as you switch to their database is better (at least from our experience). I sometimes find it a frustrating database to use, but I am a power user - for day to day admin and teachers I think it is fine. So essentially, depending on your priorities, both are reasonable products. I have no experience with SIMS NextGen, but I have been a data manager some 15 years and it has been "in development" that entire time. I do hope I see a product fully launched in my lifetime, just as a bucket list item at this point.