jthompson

Once Apple iMessage supports RCS, there'll be no need for WhatsApp any more. But seriously, I can't help feeling that good old email ought to be the core of parent comms. As a human being, I find organisations communicating with me via text/chat quite annoying, since email is invariably preferable: not tied to a single device and easier to search for.

Arrr! I remember me first encounter wit' talk like a pirate day. 'twas a Moodle site flyin' the Jolly Roger and sportin' a piratey language pack. That be English (en_ar)!!!!!! (What be piratey for 'feature request')?

Remote Desktop Manager Free is a fairly comprehensive RDP client that has both a Windows and a Mac version, so no real reason to choose Windows over Mac on RDP grounds.

Yes, SIMS Connected. SIMS ID also supports signing in using existing Google or MS accounts. We're using Google accounts, so that once up and running nobody needs to remember any SIMS ID creds. Those SIMS ID creds do remain active, though, even if using one of the SSO mechanisms, so will still need to be kept secure. We've only been using the service since the summer half term, and whilst there have been a few issues during that time (the first week of September was a bit painful), there's nothing yet that giving us any cause to think that we might want to revert back to on-prem SIMS. Obviously, other contributors here have described longer/different experiences with it than that.

Yes, it works. It's all done via an HTML5 RDP client, so no extra extensions or anything needed on client devices. File uploads/downloads and printing also works just as it does on a Windows device.

Veeam application aware backups are a good idea if you're not already using them as part of your Veeam jobs. Additionally, a maintenance plan in SQL Server can automate a scheduled backup of your databases, retaining them in the backup location for a configured period to avoid. Haven't read this particular article, but from the screenshots it looks like it's pointing in the right general direction. https://www.sqlshack.com/automate-sql-database-backups-using-maintenance-plans/

I guess it hangs on whether the SIMS Connected service is problematic every day, or just on the odd occasion. So far for us it's been the latter, so the service here for end users is generally better than when it was when on prem (no client upgrades, offsite/onsite experience works the same for them) and it opens the door for us to deploy Chromebooks to teaching staff. If it were the former, then yes, the calculus would admittedly be quite different. I guess the true picture for us here will only emerge over time. Your point about sovereignty over the database is an interesting one. How do migrations to different MIS providers generally work? Are they a matter of "send us a copy of your SQL Server db files please" or can they leverage some kind of sync agent?

Quite a few responses here are basically recommending to migrate away from SIMS to a properly cloudy alternative. However, if a school has decided, for whatever reason, to continue with SIMS, then I can't really see any compelling reason to stick with classic on-prem SIMS over SIMS Connected. No, it's not really a proper cloud offering, but it is SaaS. And it gets responsibility for that database off your hands. As someone who has stared into the abyss of a catastrophic loss of a SIMS server on more than one occasion (once to hardware failure and once to ransomware), I will happily trade a few weeks of flakey service during the year and some fairly minor manual user provisioning for being able to sleep at night and not having to run, maintain and back up a 20GB SQL database and its host system. And whilst SOLUS did actually work okay for us, I'm delighted to never again have to deploy or upgrade 200+ SIMS clients ever again.

Chrome OS Flex springs to mind. There's a list of supported hardware here - https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11513094?sjid=7841116599265458691-EU Or Chromium OS (personally never tried that). Edit: I'm assuming here that "use as a guest" is available out of the box. I remember yonks ago there was one called JoliOS, but that died years ago. I don't knwo if there's any non-Chromium equivalent.

Self-signed and signed by the internal CA are different things, aren't they?

I've found this page helpful when trying to manage user expectations this week - https://parentpaygroup.service-now.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0037319 I've subscribed to it so that ought to give me a sense of the number of issues throughout the year. The service seemed fine for us on results days, but it's been patchy this week. Still happy to have the server off my hands, though.

This is why I'm not in love with failover clusters: I always feel as though the benefits of them are massively outweighed by the complexity, and that there's always a single point of failure anyway. We've supplemented ours with a DC on a standalone Hyper-V host.

The Visit a class feature that was added in the summer is handy for IT support, pastoral and subject leads. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/06/visit-class-google-classroom.html

That's exactly the phrase that always pops into my mind when considering that inertia related to switching away from SIMS. As mentioned, we are making use of the Wonde API to overcome some of what SIMS is lacking, and EduLink gets used by lots of staff as a more accessible option for the core 20% of features that allow them to do 80% of their stuff, so SIMS .net itself is seeing less use anyway and slowly disappearing under a layer of third-party tools. MIS provider could be switched out underneath that without end users noticing particularly. It's areas like exams where the other MIS options were not apparently on feature parity with SIMS: that wouldn't be my judgement to make tbh, so I leave that to colleagues.

I do agree on the whole, but the collective decision here has been to continue with SIMS. The significant amount of change it represented to workflows all across the school meant that it couldn't be considered a no-brainer. We've got a lot of use out of the Wonde API, which kinda makes up for not having direct API access to the MIS. Hopefully, developing our stuff on that basis will make switching MIS underneath Wonde more of a no-brainer in future.

I'd be surprised if that option interferred with the content compliance rules. I thought that comprehensive mail storage just meant that the emails generated by other Google apps besides Gmail were also stored in the user's sent items in Gmail (document sharing notificaitons, etc.). Edit: Just seen that https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl=en-GB&article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fa%2Fanswer%2F3547347%3Fhl%3Den-GB&assistant_id=generic-unu&product_context=3547347&product_name=UnuFlow&trigger_context=a would suggest that you're indeed correct.

Looking back a few years, it didn't really matter that accounts weren't available during the first week, but there are so many more online platforms being used now which are based on SSO or some kind of sync.

Meant to add that our automated provisioning is a custom setup that combines Wonde API, Apps Script, AppSheet and PowerShell. When your MIS (SIMS) has no API that you can use, a little bit of Apps Script talking to Wonde goes a long way!

Staff and students' accounts are all provisioned automatically as soon as they appear in the MIS. Passwords initialised to their DOB, which is my top tip for simplifying onboarding. Deprovisioning is similarly automated. List of new intake usernames is shared with ICT teachers ready for onboarding in their first lessons. The list can be filtered by class, so that it can be shown on the board. All the other staff are advised to surface in the email directory the email address of any other new starters that they might get in their class. That combined with DOB passwords means nobody has to leave the room or call IT. For sixth form, it usually takes a week at the start of term for admissions/leavers decisions to settle down.

I should think you'll want a content compliance rule in Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Compliance. At a rough guess, the rule would need to be something like: Inbound Advanced content match > 'Envelope sender' contains "[email protected]" Change envelope recipient > Replace recipient > "[email protected]" That's assuming that you're wanting to it to apply to any receipient in the org(s) that the rule is enabled on. If it were just specific recipients that you wanted to specify, and those as additional matching rules in step 2 as advanced content match > 'Any envelope recipient'.

One more thing to add is that SIMS ID is a bit of an added layer of complexity on the user management front, but we're at a point now where our staff are SSOing in off the back of their existing Google accounts now, so they're not needing to worry about an extra set of creds for SIMS ID.

It's a VM that's not required as such to use SIMS Connected, but in reality you're likely to have third party sync agents that will require such a setup. The VM we have is just a Windows Server VM cleanly provisioned for the task. ESS installed and configured their third-party connector utility on there. That comprises a VPN endpoint (OpenVPN iirc) and an instance of SIMS .net configured to connect to the database hosted by them (i.e. accessible via the VPN link). ESS also then provide the database server details. We then have the various sync agents (EduLink, Wonde, GroupCall, InVentry) installed on that VM too, configured with those new database details. They need to be on the VM that has that VPN link configured, so that they can communicate with the database server. ESS won't themselves configure your various third party sync agents, so you'll need to reach out to the suppliers of those and factor that in to any migration. It was pretty straightforward though, I seem to remember.

We switched to SIMS Connected during last term, and it's worked well. The performance for end users is better than it was when it was when on-prem, and we've not knowingly encountered any outages. It posed no issues during exam results days. Our EduLink agent sync is taking a lot longer now, but that's seemingly oweing to the nature of some of our exams data, and is an active case that we're expecting to be resolved, eventually. I'm absoutely loving not having a SOLUS/SIMS server to manage and backup now. Well, apart from the VM with the third-party connector and various sync agents (it would be nice if those could be cloud-cloud).

GC has been getting some nice additional features of late, so it does feel like Google are still interested in pushing it forward. It's obviously designed for teaching and learning workflows, with a deliberately simple, focussed UI. Guardian features could be better, though. IMHO Teams is a hot mess of a UI, and I've written it off almost on that basis alone.

If it were me, I'd give the new server a new name and IP, rename the old one and add the old name as an alias on the new server. That way, all the shares that are expecting the old name will still work, but you'll be able to begin updating shares to use some other naming at your leisure.