Stuart_C

Can I, with full rights to everything, not delete them? What if the person't left? Anyway my first point of call is to send out the list with all the public reports on to their creators and say "are these usefull/Needed by everyone?" If not then save them as private and delete the public ones.

Is there a way to export a list of the reports in SIMS into something usefull (like Excel/CSV) I'm just having a bit of a tidly up and want to get rid of all the rubbish public report staff have created and just leave the usefull ones. However to do that I need a list and I don't want to manually type them all out.

I've just been looking at the analysis reports and they don't appear to apply the subfilters to student contact. Thus it doesn't suppress blanks or filter by date. Also I don't think I can get achievemnet and behaviour on one sheet.

within your E-mail policy do you explicitely require staff to use their school address for school use? I know some staff here forward their E-mail onto blackberries and external sites which I put up with becuase up until very recently we had no external access. Now we do I'm wondering if the policy should be altered. I suspect a couple of staff may use there own on occasion and I'm just wondering if for the good of the organisation, tightening up the policy might be an idea.

Why would you want to get up early on thE first of January? P.S. I've had an iPhone 4 since release day and the only problem I've had was when it froze and needed a reset. Once. But do I expect it to be perfect? No. It's a computer at the end of the day and as I spend all day fixIng them I know it's not going to be perfect. Though I'd rather spend an extra hour in bed than text the wrong person

Blast you beat me to that and shouldn't SOLUS3 make it easier to auto update with minimal disruption. Besides 3 times a year is not that much of an inconvienience surely? I would be tempted to say that no MIS is "perfect". The key is to find one that you are most comfortable with and go with it. There are bits of sims that I really like, large areas that we are underusing and I would love to learn more about it. Does that mean I am unhappy with it? No. Part of the problem now for schools is that the integration oF the MIS system into school life (if done well) is so great that any change is such a culture shock to the school that it needs to be seriously considered. I certainly would be opposed to any change to our current MIS without exceptional justification. I would certainly expect any school thinking of changing to be seriously asking "what benefits to I gain by changing" and "do those benefits outweigh the financial costs and culture shock of changing MIS"

Thanks to the new reporting fields I've got some reports that detail all the behaviour and achievements for yeargroups, houses, and even by person over a defined period. The problem might be that they are a bit specific to us, however dumping all the information into excel (name, points, achievement, year group filtered by date range) and then using the function sumifs (office 2007/2010) you can do a lot of analysis. Pm me with an email address if you want to have a look and see if they are useful

Or not! I've just discovered a massive flaw because my sample data was so small! Oh well only a week wasted. Back to the drawing board, hopefully I'll be able to salvage something from the spreadsheets I've written.

Whilst I'd still need to look at the latest version of SIMS and possibly your reporting thread I have just figured out how to do it for a date range. In Excel SUMIFS and the Advanced Filter are your friends. I can now total up the highest scorer's in each year group for a defined date range.* *Disclaimer - I don't actually have fully complete Behaviour/Achievemnt scores as we are in the implimentation stages at the moment so my sample data is a bit limited. Having said that it looks good.

Cheers. I've been thinking that I can do it through Excel as it's an adaptation of the reports I've created to do that for each boarding house, however it's easier when you have to lookup 8 boarding houses or 400 odd students. Plus the boarding houses don't change! I'll have a look at that topic and in the latest update to SIMS. Unfortunatley the SLG issue forced me to delay the upgrade and now I have to wait until the reports are finished!

Is there a way to report a students net acheivement/behaviour points? The filed is calculated in SIMS in the behaviour management screen but I can't see where to actually report that value. I'd ideally like to report on a students accademic points total between a set period without having to report to some really complex Excel creation. I need the totals for all students in the school. So it would be a real pain to have to do it though Excel (I don't think impossible, just a pain)

I just used FSRM to disable the desktop.ini file. Seems to have worked here and I've not seen any real negative effects.

Ive created a custom report template in SIMS that after generating my report copies the data into another spreadsheet. The problem is that after running (which it does fine) I am left with two extra copies of excel open in the background that I don't really need. Is there a way in VBA to close down other copies of excel? I've seen the code to colse the activeworkbook but that's the one I need open. It's the other's I need to close.

I'm looking into opening up the IMAP ports on my mail server so that devices like blackberries can use it. Is it very bad if I don't run it over SSL? i.e. is everyone else quite happily running it normally. I realise that I probably should run it over SSL and it would be more secure but I'm wondering if, in general, people are NOT using IMAP over SSL.

Cheers for the response. (I had found that ) I think my confusion is that I don't understand certificate generation. The CSR can be generated when purchsing the certificate and doens't necessarily need to be generated by the software does it?

And if so have you got it to work with an externally craeted SSL certificate? I don't really want my end users having to deal with SSL certificate warnings (not becuase I'm nice, just because I don't believe that they are clever enough to cope). My other bit of kit that runs on SSL gave me the option to generate as CSR? Which I then (even with my flaky understanding of the process) used to create a valid SSL certificate from a trusted CA. MDemon doesn't give me that option, yet the instructions say I can import one but not how to generate the CSR which I assume I need. Or do I? Help?

Bit tricky to answer without knowing your set up better. For example I have a single OU called users which applies all the policies to. I then have a sub OU called teachers where I have a second GPO that I applys the different settings I want for teachers. Whilst I have a he same custom start menu for both staff and pupils it works ok. I would try looking at the GPO redirecting the start menu. there's the analysis too you can run to see what settings are applying. Possibly even the security (file and share) on the locAtion you are using for your stArt menu.

We've got it for our financial DB after our accounts department got hacked off with Earnie32. I'm not really sure how they all feel about it but we've got the Personnel/Payroll/Fees/School Shop bits (Using SIMS for accademic management). I would suspect that it's the old 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Some thing it does well, some things it does badly. I do like how the program totally locks everyone out when you update it though to stop those who "Forgot" about the three E-mails you sent saying when you were applying updates and have logged in and caused problems.

Is there a way to edit a fmail merge field so that it just display's the first character. For example if my source data is "Herring" the merged letter just says "H". Following on from that is it possilbe to only show the first character and any subsequent character that follows a space? For example if my source data was "Herring Trout" it would show "H T" I'm trying to do mail merges direct from SIMS and I'd like to know if I can generate the middle initials in a merge so I can't really edit the source data.

Rubbish... So it's just going to be a pain. Word 2010 in answer to the question about what version I'm using.

I've recently been experimenting creating RTF reports to do some more complicated stuff. Whilst it's been about as fun as it can be I'm having problems with something. When I create the RTF template and alter the margins (in this report though I have the same problem with columns), create my report then use the "save and close" in the add ins. Report runs fine. When I go back into the RTF template to make more changes the margins default back to the original setting. Why and how do I stop it.

Yep, and it's a real pain in the backside as I need the Autumn update as there should be a fix I need yet I can't apply it as it will cause issues with our hosted SLG (apparently) and it's report wrinting time!

thought that might be the case. it's not biggie, I just needed to know. Cheers.

What do you do with Win7 Machines which winge with the "interactive services" message?

If I use GroupPolicy Preferences to create a folder and Group Policy to set the security of said folder in the same GPO in what order are the items applied? For example are Policies applied first so setting the security fails, then the folder is created and at the next GP Refresh/startup the security is set? Or will it create the folder first then apply the security as they are in the same GPO and it will just "know"? Or will the Preferences be applied first then the Policy which has the net same result as the second option but for a differenet reason.