hmd01

I work in an independent school that is all Mac... (well, all... except for the one Windows server that some Admin staff have to remote onto from their Macs to use the MIS or Finance s/w) :-)

Did you manage to get this to work? I was thinking that something along the lines of fn Concat((left(Event.Lect.Single.Lect.Forename),1),(left(Event.Lect.Single.Lect.Surname),1)) ought to work, but I can't get it to. I can get the length function to work, but left and right just don't seem to work??

Hi, Thanks for your suggestions, sorry I have been away for so long. The fn key above the del key did not do the trick, but holding down the Apple (cmd) key whilst pressing F9 worked - don't know why I didn't try that in the first place! Thanks again for your responses.

Hi, We are accessing Facility through Parallels on the Mac. There are several places in Facility where you need to press the F9 key to bring up the data tree. The F9 key does not work on my machine in this way and although I can use the Parallels menu option Action | Send Keys | F9 to reproduce this keystroke, it is not ideal for the admin staff to have to do this. Does anyone know if it is possible to get this to work please? Is anyone else running a similar setup? Many thanks P.S. I am using Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac, Build 5584

Our Bursar's team are still using an old DOS version of Sage too, but are looking to move over to ABS Fee Master with Sage 200, if that means anything to anyone? Incidentally, they want to install the new Finance system on the Windows server that we are running CMIS on. Can anyone advise if this is ok to do (please pardon my ignorance)? The school uses Macs and Mac servers, so the only thing on the Windows server is CMIS. It would seem a bit excessive for the school to buy another Windows server for the Finance system, but equally, I don't want their system messing up CMIS or using up resource that might impact the performance of CMIS. From other threads it appears that CMIS can be pretty resource hungry itself. Any advise/thoughts please? Thanks

Yes, E1 got a big thumbs down from here too. Exporting data from Phoenix Gold to Facility Admin is a nightmare. Don't underestimate how long this will take you. I keep thinking there must be a better way, using ODBC or something, but haven't figured it out yet. If anyone has any info or advice, it would be very much appreciated.

Thanks Joe. I was hoping to avoid dual-running the systems, as it seems like such an overhead, but I am slowly coming round to thinking that despite the short term pain, it might be for the best in the long run.

Hi there, Does anyone have any recent experience of migrating from another MIS system to Facility? I am interested to know how well the data transferred from your old system to Facility. I see from the demo that there is an option to import data from SIMS and SIMS.NET, so I am working on the basis that data from SIMS matches the fields in Facility ok. However, if you are moving from another MIS to Facility (as we are), you have to provide SERCO with your data in Excel format, which they then load into your database as a one off exercise. That in itself seems problematic to me, as I want to 'play' with a snapshot of our data first so that we can train using that, and then when we are ready to go live, export the latest data to use in the live system. So I am interested to know if anyone has any recent experience of this, and how well the data imported - did the fields match up ok? I have heard of schools where the data did not import very well so they gave up and typed all the information in manually(!) That was several years ago, and of course it does depend on what data they provided (if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out...), so any uptodate experiences would be useful to hear about. Many thanks.

Thanks for the clarification, appreciate it.

I am confused! Serco, CMIS and Facility seem to be used interchangeably. I thought Serco was the company and Facility the name of the software/system. So where does CMIS fit in please? Many thanks