Joe_Cole

I think you'd need to talk to Serco about doing a second data transfer. The success of otherwise depends to a certain extent as to how clean your data is in your current system and how much you want to take across. Inevitably a degree of tidying up will be involved. It's certainly worth trying to get your head round the structure of the main student tables in the Facility database in Facility as that will give you the option of using SQL as well as the Facility software to tidy data. Are you planning to dual-run your old system alongside Facility for a while? I would recommend this, as it means there is not such a rush to get all your data across. This gives you time to assess how you might want to store data differently in Facility than you did in your old system.

I'd second what Lee said about the advantages and disadvantages of using Sleuth rather than CMIS for behaviour management (except that my school TOOK my advice and used CMIS) The main advantage of Sleuth is that for a single event you can have multiple students and for those students multiple outcomes (i.e. a detention AND a letter home). In CMIS the event is attached to a single student, so if several students are involved you have to add and event to each student (though this is easier these days if you are using ePortal to add the events). If you want multiple outcomes, you'd have to add multiple fields to the event (i.e. 'outcome 1','outcome2','outcome3'), which is then a bit of a pain when you come to write reports. However, with CMIS you do have all your data in one place and you don't have to install and manage additional software for everyone who wants to record events.

I was involved in migrating from SIMS to Facility CMIS about 5 years ago. That was pre-SIMS.net and, cost aside, it was a no-brainer - CMIS was clearly the superior product. With the advent of SIMS.net, the two are much closer together. This means you really have to think carefully about what you want to achieve by switching systems and whether it is worth the upheaval. As has been mentioned above, Facility is strong on configurability, so you can use it to support you school systems and processes rather than having to change your systems and processes to match the software. However, this means the learning curve is far steeper and it's not as user-friendly 'out of the box' as SIMS.net. To make a success of CMIS, you need to make sure that the staff and management have the appropriate time, skills and motivation. That really means a dedicated Data Manager working purely on MIS, plus a management team who know why they want to move to CMIS and who will have a hands on involvement in managing the implementation. CMIS will be more work, not less, but is much more powerful if you get it right. Where schools have regretted moving from one system to another it is usually because the management team thought - 'we don't like SIMS / CMIS and it's causing us trouble, let's try something else'. The decision should be made in terms of specific things the school wants to achieve, and the knowledge that your current system definitely can't help you achieve this and the new system definitely will. It's all basic stuff, but you'd be surprised how many schools don't think this through properly.