jcooke16

We moved to Arbor a couple of years ago but before that I did try to tackle permissions in SIMS, and have since done the equivalent in Arbor. It fell to me as we no longer had a MIS manager as such, but I was reasonably well-placed to gauge what access everyone needed (I do timetabling and some areas of IT but was a teaching HOD before I supposedly retired!) In my experience it seems that out-of-the-box permission groups can rarely meet the needs of individual settings, and I agree it's best to strip back to the minimum and to add on extras as required. Sometimes for us this has resulted in customised settings for groups with particular roles, and sometimes it needs a more bespoke approach for individuals with specific responsibilities. Who should do it? Depends so much on the particular establishment set-up, but I think for operational purposes it could equally well be overseen by (and this isn't an exhaustive list) IT support, or a MIS manager, or an HR manager, or a timetabler in conjunction with an office manager, as long as there is a clear enough framework. Then ideally should have a line manager/ approver for anything non-standard?

Hi - bit late to this thread as someone at school has just mentioned tentatively looking at Sign-in app. The write-back issues described here could be a problem with our set-up; can anyone confirm if they apply to Arbor as well as Bromcom?

Desktops here in classrooms and offices, partly for longevity and comfort/ease of use but also because our elderly site has lots of separate buildings and several external staircases - so in general the less people have to carry around, the better. PE staff have iPads. SLT and any support staff who may need to work from home can also have a laptop if they wish, and in the rare situations when anyone else wants to borrow one we have spares (though not sure we'd be able to provide many of those for a while after W10 goes out of support).

Only just saw this so I'm a bit late - but I definitely came across it too when I last used SIMS a year or two ago. Nova didn't like the same group names in different linear blocks but didn't mind for single classes. I did see if I could find fixes at the time but could only get round it by adding an extra character to the group names in at least one of the linear blocks, to distinguish them.

Hi - I realise this was posted a few days ago so I hope you've been able to find out somehow by now! (If not, I can probably help though I don't use NT6 at the moment). However in case more questions crop up I just thought I'd mention that there are a couple of Facebook groups specifically for mutual support with NT6. One is public (SIMS Nova-T6 Timetable), and the other is private (NT6 Users); both as I recall have very helpful members who respond quickly to questions, and there's quite a lot of sharing of screenshots.

From memory, I think the quickest way to remove these particular locks is to go to Auto then in the bottom right corner select "All" then "Unbuild" (or tag the blocks you want on the left hand side and just unbuild tagged ones). For replacing a teacher, though, it may be easier just to edit the staff name and code in Plan - teachers?

Had a reply re opening times, from [email protected], to the effect that The Arena is open from 9am (on the general admissions ticket) but the doors open to the actual exhibition at 10am.

Don't know but I did in fact email earlier to ask - I wondered if the earlier talks were for a specific Leaders audience or something like that, but it isn't clear. A separate concern I have is that on the registration form, unless I'm prepared to pretend that I have no influence at all over purchasing, I have to select a price range for my "organisation's annual purchasing budget for education products, solutions and services". I'm sure there used to be an opt-out for that particular question - and I'm not sure I should personally be providing that sort of whole-school information. I know it's effectively a trade show, but even so... There are options for non-buyers to sign up without providing the above info, so I might choose that route - though you don't then get access to connect@bett, for one thing.

Don't know of anything that would do this in SIMS.net If your timetabling is done in Nova T6 it is possible in the "Classes" screen to add a teacher to a class but put the number of lessons for that teacher as zero; I've never actually had a use for that so not sure if it carries through to SIMS at all! I'd hope that Wonde would be working on making the synch more customisable....

I'm not aware of a way of selecting a lesson over a non-class-code in a printout (but that doesn't mean there isn't one!) You should be able to show both, via the cell settings on the SIMS print preview screen, by dragging extra data items into the cell layout - but I've always found it very clunky (or maybe that's just me...). It's not very helpful either if the setting is one you only want for a few people who have clashes. If you do change the setting to show both, exporting either to HTML or Excel for printing often makes things look nicer as it doesn't truncate the text.

Not sure, but I wonder if it's possible to do it by reducing the number of periods in the timetable model (for my school that would be within Nova-T6) to zero for the relevant classes while leaving everything else unchanged? I'd want to find a way of testing it first though in case it wrecked anything mid-year!

As Cache says, CTRL-dragging the subject in the model will do the split. You should see the and b classes in the Nova-T Classes screen and can also select a or b from a drop-down when using the Edit Staff window. The following bit is only in case you were talking about a situation where you need to split the group for some, but not all, of the lessons for a particular subject within a block: If so, as I recall, you can put the subject in twice on the same row - once with the number of whole group periods and once with the number of periods you are going to split, then use the CTRL-drag method to split that 2nd instance. In this situation you'd just need to build a bit of the block again as well. (We used to do it for GCSE PE with whole class theory and M/F practical).

I remember a year or so ago emailing someone at the DfE - there was an address given towards the end of the original PDF guidance document - and they very promptly sent me a copy to forward to a provider. (Sorry I can't be more specific just now as am about to rush off to a GDPR meeting!)

Warning: I have absolutely no idea if this would work as I haven't done it, and am rather nervous about suggesting something I've never tried, so I really hope someone else is going to comment! Are you using Nova T6? If so, my first thought would be: - in the model, increase the minimum periods in block A by one - in the block view for A, in the new (unscheduled) period, "Protect empty slot" for any other subjects in the block to prevent accidental moves - drag the lesson you want to move from the twilight session to the unscheduled slot - in the bands screen, drop the unscheduled lesson on top of the block B period - in the "clash" pop-up, tick to lock it into place. Or maybe someone has a better suggestion? J