minimoo

I'm assuming migration is a given at some point - Capita have like 250 staff in total I believe - I can't see them spliting that between sims7 and sims8 as their market is still the same number of schools. So that means at some point presumably sims8 will become an 'upgrade' from 7. Capita used to complain about the demands put on them by government census's etc - I can't imagine they want to code that work twice for ever. I can imagine capita backing down at some point and letting school's host their own version - but *only* if cloud concept fails in some way. So I'd expect that in 5 years from now - sims7 development will have ceased and schools would have been upgraded to sims8, whether that's still cloud only or not will depend on what happens between now and then with the cloud - but it's quite clear the direction things are currently going. I still remember how the migration from the old sims modules to sims.net worked - that was fun - with the system being in 'read only mode' for a while etc.

Hi Guys, I'm late to the party, but I moved to using a powershell script to delete profiles - so I could apply different rules for teachers vs students- I then set that to run as a scheduled task at 12:30 each day as i've found profile deletion can be quite slow! I can post a copy here if someone wants

@bigdanny - you've probably made the best point in this whole thread (apart from Phil's insight into the future ofc). We've recently been evaluating replacing our wireless - I got as far as going "whilst we really like company X for reasons a,b,c - we should probably also look at vendor Y as their web interface..." at which point I stopped. I don't look at current wireless web interface. Our purpose for updating is to replace old kit that is problematic and occassionally needs a reboot. IF I have to look at web interface to diagnose lots of issues with the new wireless kit - that would means the new kit is a failure. Therefore as I realised with wifi kit - I don't need to care about what XvsY do in their web ui. For solus - the same concept is true - The only action I should need to take is to "deploy a new upgrade" - agents should update themselves, sims should update itself on it's own. If I ever need to log in to solus UI to do more then deploy an upgrade the system has failed (which means there's a bug to resolve which means a support case to log). With a cloud MIS - only time we should be touching it is if school staff identify a bug, some REST api call is being slow (you'd hope capita would monitor that themselves), azure fails

Azure supported ipv6 for VM's when they launched that as a service in September for their UK North and UK South 2 regions - but not UK west and UK south ( never seen UK split up that way before!) - of course don't know if Capita are making use of VM's or the other azure products. In any case, I suspect that means by the time we need to worry it will be even if it isn't yet

As a secondary school it's going to be a few years until capita get everything into their cloud based software - but I think we are still at the point that people are unsure about whether they trust the cloud - and equally, whether we are yet at the point where you can make web based systems that are as easy to use as desktop systems (although that gap is definitely closing with modern web things) so that is the concern re sims 8 people will have. At the same time, arguably capita are probably likely to do a better job of data protection then myself. So I guess that's where i'm waiting to see how sims 8 stacks up - can you get the complexity and functionality that is required into a web based app. I can't imagine timetabling via a web UI for instance... In terms of MSI's, both @zag and @2ilent8cho hit the nail with " I too am sick of Solus and all this update rubish, it takes up so much of my time." and "had to just sit there and twiddle our thumbs until the agent decided to upgrade" - and this is the point that i've really tried to get across to Capita lately (And I really really hope I've done enough to make that point to @PhilNeal and others, as I've definitely tried). Many people (myself included) are more likely to comment on things that get on their nerves - in terms of solus 3 I've taken a simple approach recently - we have an automated install that puts on all apps + solus3 client - so the first person to log onto a new installed PC is a teacher. If sims isn't there, and first line guy can't get it to kick off i.e. by clicking check for updates - checking that it's in solus3 db with a target, we send systemlog to support to work out what's going on so thy can fix the root issue for future releases. @matt40k the reason people are still ranting is from an IT point of view, having sims not arrive and having to mess about costs lots of time - and that's 'time' that we don't have to spend when deploying other apps in some cases.

I was about to post and say that "aulting application name: Pulsar.exe, version: 7.159.4.0, time stamp: 0x53bd5995" is a really old version - and suggest that the catering system service likely has capita's Business objects open in the background so it's not updated due to them being in use (i.e. server would need a reboot), but that's likely not to be the case as I looked at the original post. However, posting this anyway, as i've seen this happen in the past. @victory2015 maybe start a new thread with the actual error you are hitting? I'd also look in the sims folder and check .dll files look to all be updated (for the reason I say above)

As it stands today, I think I prefer solus 3 over solus 2 - even if Solus 3 is the accounts for the majority of times I contact the helpdesk

@Michael for schools and sims 7 they seem to charge £2500 - from a business sense (15 hours of developer support) that's not too bad - it does however put a stop to any individual schools trying to do something useful - or for any one to develop an open source project that links with sims for instance, as you'd need to be really committed to an idea to put in the initial outlay.

yep - makes some sense. It does however mean that a system that could be local to a LAN (sims 7), is potentially always accessible to the world (sims 8) - so the risk increases (at the same time, arguably in contrast - cloud vendors might be better at configuring security than an IT admin in a local lan) "To put it another way, every school uses Assessment tools, yet no two schools output in exactly the same format. It's all about offering flexible tools to do what schools want." @Michael - what will be interesting as the cloud becomes more embedded is whether vendors keep their API's to themselves and 3rd parties - or whether they allow schools free access as customers.

@PhilNeal - more to the point, given that any company that chooses to process data in the cloud should be ensuring that the cloud provider has implemented appropriate safeguards, and will be jointly liable for any breach.. presumably schools (as data controllers) should be conducting their own risk assessments and asking capita appropriate questions to ensure that they are happy with the appropriate security measures - one legal firm goes as far as saying about getting "personalised contracts with cloud providers". The 72 hour notification period that I believe is required under the GDPR? should also be interesting with schools if a breach occurred at the wrong time - I was trying to get hold of a CTF file on friday afternoon... school i was trying to contact is locked up until after easter now! All I can say is you will need a lot of Good Luck ;/ In terms of security and the cloud version - if it's a browser interface - there's two locations staff are likely to access the system: a) from a personal/home pc - which could have any number of viruses on depending on staff. School policy could say that staff shouldn't use their own devices, but only school owned. In this case, there could be a 3rd party keylogger running - the obvious way to defend that is some form of two-factor authentication b) from a school owned device (that should have up to date AV, security settings etc) - either in school or at home. The most likely risk point here is probably that the teacher logs on in a classroom, then walks off, and a student accesses data in the system. Hits copy and pastes and pastes it to a public website. For the 2nd - getting staff to think differently is key - as I don't think there's any difference between leaving the PC unlocked - or leaving your mark-book on the desk of an unlocked classroom - where the markbook has a printout of names<>photos - that is still technically personal data under the GDPR right? If not, you basically need a non-invasive two factor auth with every rest api call system - and if you can invent that, you can probably retire from capita

@Jehanzeb Regarding collecting feedback, I received the following response on a case today: "Unfortunately due to the fact we re-visited the way our change requests are processed fairly recently it appears that this request has been lost as we cannot find this issue anywhere on the backlog. As such you will need to re-do the change request via the normal route witch will then be reviewed and actioned". Whilst I get that it costs money to make a change, it needs testing etc, and that some things are hard to implement, it equally should not take over 12 months of nagging to get a 1 line change to a MSI and a 1 character change to a db field to fix 2 bugs. So whilst it's yet to be seen if Capita will insist on a cloud-only approach (or let schools/trusts run a local cloud version if they insist), I assume that the potential of having the ability to be more agile might mean that Capita are able to react faster and respond to issues - which should be a good thing. As the moment I get the impression that the 'legacy' setup they have inherited is holding things back. At the same time, I'm equally surprised we've not seen a mixed approach between the existing app and web-based - i.e. capita introducing a web UI for all teachers to use to take registers sooner (and by that i mean 'free' as part of existing sims offering)

- We've just finished out options process, as we need to write the timetable in May/June ready for next year, so I suspect most school's won't be able to make use of that module until Spring 2018, as they are probably either doing or planning things now... For the exams analysis - will that be available before the august exam results come out? Or is the plan with options 8/exams analysis preparing schools for 2018 usage?

I wrap it into a powershell script - for example, below is a copy and paste from a report I run/created that gives me a list of staff who don't have a photo on sims: I've got about 15-20 of these which I run once a day to flag up housekeeping stuff this script is run by another powershell script that sends an email each day of any issues i.e. if script output is not blank $pinfo = New-Object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo $pinfo.FileName = "c:\program files (x86)\sims\sims .net\CommandReporter.exe" $pinfo.RedirectStandardError = $true $pinfo.RedirectStandardOutput = $true $pinfo.UseShellExecute = $false $pinfo.Arguments = "/USER:***USERNAME*** /PASSWORD:*****PASSWORD**** /REPORT:""LAT-DataCheck-StaffPhoto"" /QUIET" $p = New-Object System.Diagnostics.Process $p.StartInfo = $pinfo $p.Start() | Out-Null $stdout = $p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd() $stderr = $p.StandardError.ReadToEnd() $p.WaitForExit() #Write-Host "stdout: $stdout" #Write-Host "stderr: $stderr" #Write-Host "exit code: " + $p.ExitCode $xml = [xml]$stdout if( $xml.SuperStarReport.Record ) { Write-Host "This Script Checks for staff users with no photo set " Write-Host "Action Required: Allocate photo to staff in SIMS" Write-Host " " Write-Host "Staff Missing photos:" $xml.SuperStarReport.Record | Select-Object primary_id,Full_x0020_Name,Photo_x0020_Available | ConvertTo-Html -Fragment } [/Code]

heh, you should have asked for pricing on that model on friday - apparently there was one at distributor at 1000 - then jumped to over 2500 (the 2540 and 2920 and 3800 series switches would actually be coming in cheaper!)

That's an interesting question What makes it hard is you probably start to compare pricing to other things you pay - pretty sure we pay more to Capita each year then we do to Microsoft. So on one level you think that you pay to much... on the flip side... and as I hinted in my earlier post looking at the data - their MIS is probably the most flexible for secondary school's. So therefore I think the pricing is probably about right as it stands at the moment. What I think may be wrong is the way that extra modules are charged for - in terms of web/mobile apps - as arguably that is now technology that people come to expect as part of a core product.

That's an interesting question What makes it hard is you probably start to compare pricing to other things you pay - pretty sure we pay more to Capita each year then we do to Microsoft. So on one level you think that you pay to much... on the flip side... and as I hinted in my earlier post looking at the data - their MIS is probably the most flexible for secondary school's. So therefore I think the pricing is probably about right as it stands at the moment. What I think may be wrong is the way that extra modules are charged for - in terms of web/mobile apps - as arguably that is now technology that people come to expect as part of a core product.

I've not looked at other MIS's for several years, however, I'm not really surprised with the stats. For a secondary school, where you have complex timetable requirements - when I've seen other people talking about alternative MIS's - Capita's offering has always seemed to be more "advanced" for dealing with weird cases. For someone in the school office - sims.net is great. Where Capita lack is not having an alternative web UI for teaching staff (yes, I know there's talk of a "sims 8", and yes, I know you can buy additional apps e.g. teacher app / learning gateway etc - but for the MIS's that are already web based... the web ui is free). On the primary schools side, where arguably the timetable etc are simpler - the web-based systems seem to start to eat away at Capita's market share And you almost see that statswise - secondary share up by 1.35% - primary share down by 2% for Capita. I might be completely wrong - but I wouldn't be surprised to see that trend continue - capita gaining secondary schools - but losing primary school's - surely the barrier to entry at the primary school end has got to be a lot lower? Especially if capita are charging extra for parental apps etc. @PhilNeal https://www.pupilasset.com/pricing would seem to build in the parent app for free in their pricing structure - we currently pay for sims+intouch+other modules - presumably to add the parent/student sims apps that is recently launched... that's would be a further additional cost on top? And presumably the interventions module coming in the spring release is FOC? @GREED - a) can you put an auto filter on your mis-analysis excel sheet ? b) do you happen to have post code available that you could add to your dataset? (would be nice to be able to link old schools to new academys) If I look at secondary (only) schools that were around in 2010 and are still around in 2016 - I make it that 348 schools have changed MIS - Capita picking up 235 of them. Of 49 secondary schools that were with capita in 2010 and left - 19 of them are now back with Capita - so unless I've messed up 40% of secondary schools that left, presumably paid lots of money to a company to move MIS lasted 1,2 or 3 years and then returned to Capita. Thanks for making the raw data available greed - confirmed what I expected to be the case at secondary level

Thanks and @PhilNeal - another one - that word document doesn't reference the advice given in KB72329 re PDOXUSERS.NET file and FMS

Pretty sure the answer to that is no in terms of exectuable access - although i'm not sure what you mean by registry entries for SRP.

@PhilNeal - some quick feedback - as it's quite a long document: 1) First off - really nice - this is the sort of thing that I think people are after! 2) The list on Page 1 of permissions misses: a) Nova-P uses need write access to S:\sims\snova\novap (or equiv) b) NovaT6 users need write access to S:\sims\snova\nt6 and S:\sims\snova\transfer (if you want to use that as default transfer directory - i think this dir can get changed so could just be my docs), c) options to S:\sims\options 3) In terms of must have permissions to c:\windows\temp - really???? pretty sure we don't give any staff access to that folder with full control and never noticed any issue 4) In terms of c:\windows\sims.ini - same - We never have given write access to that - although granted if you use an old sims.ini module you need access but afaik that only applies to the old BDE apps now

@PhilNeal - I think you've probably got two different audiences. The audience on here of mainly technical people (who would probably understand the non-simplified version) and then those who are more "office staff" in a primary school for instance. We've got data going back to Star for DOS - which may be safe to delete mixed in with the stuff I know is still used (e.g. your cover example). To that end I'd rather have non-simplified advice that was more explicit as it would allow us to start to tidy up and remove the old star data. [and I think i've just repeated what phil/vikpaw got in first with]

@kennysarmy @PhilNeal Sorry - as I think I missed the change of topic from ITGuru last night and thought we were still on the same topic - i.e. that Phil was saying that they couldn't support schools setting up S: drive permissions as ad groups / requirements etc are different... In any case, given that some things e.g. the attendance module - originally defaulted to saving files to S:\SIMS\ATTEND\Templates and the old DBase Data files live at S:\SIMS\ATTEND [i know this might vary for some schools], it would be good one day to see some clear guidance to allow these folders to be safely cleared down. I think in the modern sims that equates to the only things that may likely still be using a shared driver are a) attendance templates/letters, b) CTF files - both in and outwards c) documentation (from solus file server deployment) d) exams hold/in/out directories e) BACs FMS transfers f) Workforce census g) school census h) school census results reports i) NovaP data j) Options data k) Nova-T data l) a simsconnect.ini (used by solus 3) / FDS ini for fms (if multiple db's) and that anything else can probably be removed. From a personal point of view - given that S:\SIMS\*.pdf used to be where manuals + applications were stored (but I think this has moved to a sub-Documentation folder for us at least) - i'm not sure if all the documentation has moved.

@PhilNeal @ITGURU Whilst I completely agree that permissions must be done to an individual school, what capita can do (and I don't believe have done in the last 5 years - someone correct me if i'm wrong but I've not located a knowledge base article tonight when searching, nor previously) is: a) advise schools what legacy folders are safe to delete/remove from a capita point of view, whilst advising schools to think about their own data retention b) provide guidance on how sims currently uses it's shared drive I know we've still got a copy of Star for DOS and related data files sitting on our S: drive - pretty sure even with the 7+ years data retention we likely need to keep data for, that those files could be removed - and by keeping them may be a data protection risk? (were the old star for dos dbase files encrypted? - i'm guessing not) - yet those files currently live in a folder where there are live folders for novat/p, options. I suspect if there was a clear document listing what is still used, and people were able to tidy up legacy folders that working out the appropriate permissions should be something that would be more then feasible for any competent network admin to do...

@Max_Power Equally i'll need to watch next time - I'm used to expecting sims updates to take for ever i.e. it used to be the case if I kicked solus3 off at 3.45pm (the second the bell went), that the deployment would still be in progress at 18:00 - or just finishing as I leave. So my times were from looking at deployment log of last update. In solus 3 - Can you check settings -> solus3 -> deployments and under agents see if you have 'auto-download' ticked? I spend a fair amount of time doing development, so i'm probably also coming at this from a technical angle. I also feel that solus3 takes up more time then it should do and I personally think it's a shame you can't comment on CR's - as sometimes when reading them it's possible to spot something related. I suspect I'm probably uniquehere - but if I go back to April 2014 - 25% of the support cases we have raised are on Solus 3. Since April, if I look at calls we've logged - 30% were for solus3, 18% were for existing patch requests. 16% of calls were for bugs/issues that required a patch/application fix (we've got an FMS issue we hit most years at year end and have to get a modified version of the same patch for each year). 25% were on some novaT/NovaP issues and trying to create some reproducible test cases - and the remaining 10% of the time were enquiry/queries. Whilst I'd hope that's a unique picture for us - it does mean that 50% of the times I contact the helpdesk are either regarding solus 3 or requesting a patch that already exists, isn't on solus3 and I need to ask for manually. Equally, if I'm not unique here - you could drastically reduce the load on the helpdesk by looking at the patch management process. In terms of solus, the only things we did/do are: a) we push out agent via vbscript from capita (as back in the initial days at least, pushing out an agent via AD caused WMI to crash sometimes, taking down the solus service, and required a laptop to be on mains power for the scheduled task the solus service created to run to install the agent (or actually i think install dotnet when that was required) b) we changed the default port from 55432 to 48000. This was due to windows sometimes using the port for existing TCP connections causing the solus service not to be able to listen on the port ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/929851/the-default-dynamic-port-range-for-tcp-ip-has-changed-in-windows-vista-and-in-windows-server-2008 ). We originally installed solus3 in 2011 - Microsoft added a hotfix in 2012 to allow people to exclude ports from the default range ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2665809/you-cannot-exclude-ports-by-using-the-reservedports-registry-key-in-windows-server-2008-or-in-windows-server-2008-r2 ). I'm not sure if solus' installer runs that netsh command, but I could probably move to using the default port if I ran that command that didn't exist back in 2011 c) In October/November 2016, Capita made a change to the solus deployment server to increase a buffer/max message size - but that was due to a change in the latest 3.56.1 release I believe. I suspect they'll change the value by default in the next release d) we changed the heartbeat timeout from 5 minutes to 13 minutes [This was orginally done in 2012 to avoid tolerance issues when performing FMS updates as we had 3 FMS databases running] e) we changed concurrent downloads from the default of 25 to 99 f) I set up solus to auto-download updates to workstations - but never auto-deploy - I want files to ready as soon as possible for when I deploy, but don't want any surprises. I normally wait 24-48 hours after the release to give workstations a chance to download then hit deploy. What I think used to happen is solus would kick off 25 updates at a time, then if someone turned off their PC in the middle, literally wait for 30 minutes (until the deployment timeout interval was hit) before deploying the next batch - so it would occassionally "get stuck". I think capita may have fixed *that* - and if so, that's where I think the priority thing you wanted no longer makes sense. The *only* time it would make sense to have priority would be if you were going to deploy the update within seconds of the release (i.e. you are not allowing a window to download to the agent).

Regarding that comment - I also logged a CR about giving some more information to evaluate the importance. I think my point is - If Capita decide to push out a patch to 17,000 schools, they obviously deem it important enough to warrant the work to test it and publish it outside the normal 3 times a year cycle. Whilst some of the patches are obvious - others are not. And then there's the current issues with the "ctf export" patch that has been released 7-8 times now and capita are still trying to make work. At the point that capita decide that a patch warrants releasing outside of the normal release cycle to all school's, I'd make the assumption that Capita deem it an "important" patch. Solus emails that the patch is there - so applying them makes some sense. As sims re-release patches to change the DB version, fix bugs in a previous patch etc, I may skip ones I think i've applied before - My point here is that you can end up with lots of different database schema's/proc's running in this way - which is probably more likely to lead to issues I think it also depends on your approach to updates - when Microsoft used to seperate out security updates, I used to wait 24-48 hours, deploy any IE patches - then look through the description of what the other patches were and deploy any ones that Microsoft deemed urgent/immediate - then wait a few days and apply the rest. That was to try and not end up with lots of patches over wireless at the start of a lesson. I often wondered whether that approach was more or less disruptive. Now microsoft do their cumulative patches - I wait 24-48 hours, hit google to check for people complaining about blue screens and then basically hit deploy. End result is the same - but it's definitely a lot quicker managing the cumulative rollups for microsoft.... and i'd expect to find the same timesaving with capita. One cumulative patch that did 4-5 patches would save the space and time on the database server backing up an 18GB database multiple times to deploy each patch - as well as the time using solus. I currently have 122GB of sims backups from deploying patches today (and yes, I know there's a tickbox for that if you remember to tick it). Across most of the requests the aim is really to reduce the amount of time/effort required to do tasks within solus. Just had a thought - whilst I still think this is something that should be optimised within solus - rather then requiring lots of configuring priorities - looking at our last deployment: 514 workstations - 229 online, 276 offline, 7 failed, 222 successful a) Capita deploy to 32bit and 64bit workstations seperately - and do 32bit *first*. This would probably be a problem even if implementing priorities for workstations - given that most workstations are moving towards 64bit... I'd be inclined to swap the order to do 64bit first... We have 0 32bit workstations on site - doing this first adds a 30 second delay to the deployment. b) the 3rd workstation that solus told to deploy was: 2016-11-14 16:22:30.2488|lt002777|Info|Target version 7.166.38.0, expected target version 7.172.36.0, update will be deployed|ProcessAgentTargets() 2016-11-14 16:22:30.2508|lt002777|Info|Attempting wake on lan.|AgentIsAvailable() 2016-11-14 16:27:37.1945|lt002777|Info|Wake on lan failed.|AgentIsAvailable() I'd probably be inclined to do an ORDER BY onlinestatus c) Equally - to be fair to solus if I look at the logs for "update will be deployed" - the first timestamp is at 2016-11-14 16:22:29.9898 and the last is at 2016-11-14 16:26:06.6835 if it now only takes 4 minutes to send deployment commands to 514 workstations - @Max_Power - I've got to ask where you actually see a delay coming in - as it strikes me that the priority change you sound keen one would be a lot of work to save 2-3 minutes?