DaveR

COMMERCIAL INTEREST DECLARED. Please also have a look at Blue Hills Software's "IEP Manager" - IEP Manager - Blue Hills Software . IEP Manager is online and has automatic pupil and staff data uploads from both SIMS and CMIS (and also planned for Progresso).

creese: thanks, we certainly shall. I don't know which LA you are with so perhaps you could email me with that info. Dave

creese: I'm sorry about that but thanks for helping the school concerned. We do make it clear to schools, especially primary schools, that they may require expert help with installing GroupCall's Xporter because it requires a fairly high-privileged SIMS/CMIS user , proxys may need to be set, and generally some school systems are very locked down; this may therefore require a combination of local support like yourself, help from Blue Hills or if it gets tricky, help from GroupCall. This may sometimes take a day or two before it can be resolved. Once the Xporter is installed however, and because IEP Manager as a web service requires no installation the whole package can be pretty much left to run and will require little or no technical support locally from that point on. Dave

COMMERCIAL INTEREST DECLARED I am a Director of Blue Hills Software Company. IEP Manager is a new (released in Jan.2011) online web-based version of our old CD-based IEP Pro software. IEP Manager uses GroupCall Xporter to upload pupil and staff data required by the program. The Xporter is widely used by LAs and schools for MIS data extraction so is a tried and tested product. As stated earlier in this thread, our company is a commercial partner with SIMS for our Provision Map Writer software. We are NOT partners with SIMS for our IEP Manager. Creese: I'm not sure why you were not impressed but if you can give me some more details hopefully and I can address that. It certainly does not matter if you have already started working with IEP Manager and then decide later to use the GroupCall Xporter to upload your data which is I think what your comment referred to. Dave Rudlin

Yes, Provision Map Writer Online is totally web-based so there is nothing to install and all data is stored on our server.

Commercial interest declared. I am a co-director of Blue Hills Software Co which produces Provision Map Writer. We normally try to avoid posting on public professional websites because it just annoys people who think it’s blatant free marketing. I agree with them but we felt it important to answer TechSupp’s post as nobody else had. I’m sorry you had this problem with installation. Since launching the product in Nov. 2007 just under 2000 schools in England have purchased or trialed the software. We have had some, but relatively few installation problems given the huge variation in IT systems within schools. We are proud of our technical support which will always help with any problems like this. Sometimes installation problems can arise with our COM-based database software that uses DLLs often found in Windows system32 folder of the Operating system. We can send our own DLLs and block Windows DLLs but we don't do this in case users need the original DLLs for other uses such as updating MS Office or Windows. Things work OK when Microsoft doesn’t issue too many updates and service packs within a short period of time. Recently, and since Microsoft introduced Vista, many database applications became redundant. Many applications couldn't install on Vista or indeed XP sp2 (hence that error message started appearing) but Blue Hills Software immediately issued an update for Vista, XP sp2 and sp3. Although it may create a whole new set of challenges, we are gradually moving our software Online to avoid these kinds of problems and Provision Map Writer itself will shortly be available online. Dave Rudlin