mattstevenson2005

You can use command line reporter to generate a report based on your own query e.g detentions not attended. We wrote some custom software that basically extracts all the detentions from sims issued on that day, then it emails the students and the parents of the students that evening. It also generates a behaviour report each evening of all the issues (resolved and ongoing) for that day and emails it to the correct head of year. If your good at programming you can use command line reporter to get anything out of sims then do with the data what you want

Hi All Just thought I would post after someone found the manufacturer of the note readers last year that we have found the manufacturer of the coin mechanisms and their service centre will upgrade the firmware for £15. Cunninghams want to charge £395 to do the same job. You do have to post your coin mechanism to them but they do a very fast turn around! Sales Dept Micro Electronic Services Ltd Unit 3 Admiralty Way Camberley Surrey GU15 3DT Tel: (01276) 36349 Fax: (01276) 36224 My contact there is Chris and is extreamly helpful! Hope this helps others out! Matt

We have gone paperless with our admissions and basically recreated the entire sims record into an online form that parents fill in at enrolment time, we then convert all the data into a custom CTF file and import all the data in one go, then the office staff just fill in the blanks that can't be done with the CTF. This year was our first full cohort on online enrolment, was a couple of teaching issues but on the whole it worked very well. Matt

You think them doing the upgrade for you is extortionate? I've been in talks with them regarding moving to a pay as you go support contract as we pay almost £4,000 per year in support and I called them 2-3 times last year, I have been told for pay as you go support it's £795+vat per call out (which includes 30 mins of work, then £95 per hour) and for them to just answer the phone it's £195 per call!!!!!

We have just started using Epson's new Print365 service. Unlimited printing (upto 300,000) for 3 years for £139 per month, per MFD. We have just purchased 4 full size MFDs and one desktop MFD to replace 5 full photocopiers and will save us between £10-15,000 over the 3 years hopefully.

We have around 500 fixed desktop pcs and around 200+ laptops that students and staff can book out from different departments/locations around the site throughout the day. To say it's quite unmanageable for the staff in these areas to keep track of them all is an understatement. We have just come to accept that we have to expect a certain level of damage to keyboards/smashed screens from accidental drops due to the sheer volume of use and number of devices. We have introduced some custom written tools and utils to help the staff keep track of who has then/had them last to try and help with the management but the physical storage is lots of charge and store laptop cabinets around the site.

How do you handle students or staff that print to printers that are in general areas which no 1 department owns and everyone shares? We currently use print manager plus which has a pop up client when any users prints from anywhere and allows them to select the department they need to bill the job too and then allows them to enter a password (which we have set to change every Sunday, these are then emailed to the corresponding department staff members for them to choose to give the students or not) we are about to move to papercut because we have purchased some new epson mfds which will be used by all departments and require papercut management suite, any idea how we achieve the same setup as we already have but with papercut?

We host our own owncloud platform and can give remote users a login or users can share encrypted files with a password. Data never leaves our site until the recipient requests a copy so no storing in the cloud

all the 3 IPs are allowed on the secure AD port, they have been sent all the OUs for staff and students, its strange that now they have done something at their end I can login with single sign on but no one else can! Have called multiple times but no one is ever available, when I have asked for them to call back I get told they only like to respond by email!!..... I told the lady we have had the product for over a week now and we still cannot use it! Their support is terrible, I would recommend people to stay away from this company, product is good but after sales care is non existent and they don't seem to care. Has taken 7 days so far to get a useless reply by email but no suggestion on when the issues will be resolved, I only get replies that state "it will be passed to our engineering team" Matt

We are a brand new customer this year. Was working fine with AD single sign on up to last Thursday then their trainer came, made changes to our setup now none of our single sign works. Contacted support via email and phone last Thursday no call backs, rang around 12 times then finally got a reply on Monday afternoon. Now there not sure what's up with it and each time they email back with something to try I reply back and it takes them another day or so to reply again! They seem to have no interest in providing support as I got told my issue was in a queue and I would have to wait our turn before they could recommend anything.

Hi Rick what tool have you been running? Matt

As mentioned last night Rick we had this exact same issue, clicked download on the SIMS & FMS Summer Database Only packages and server crashed, blue screened and rebooted. The server then got stuck in a blue screen reboot loop. Exact same description as yours few seconds at the login screen. Brand new SIMS server rebuilt now. Matt

Same here

I'm interested in your thoughts on the content filtering side? We are currently using a pair of Palo Alto units and they are great at pretty much everything and they are due for replacement later in the year and i have been trailing fortinet because the Palo Alto costs are massively more than fortinet. What are the problems you have with content filtering? Matt

You can't remove FSM data from the FSM section in SIMS this is collected in the Census to determine pupil premium funding and other top up funding. Matt

We initially got about 5 Casio LED/Laser projectors but over about 6 months the quality of the image slow deteriorated, we have now been installing the Epson wall mouthed short throw interactive 3LCD projectors, can't rate them enough, fantastic HD image quality, very bright, excellent service from Epson and very very cheap replacement bulbs (around £50 I think from memory) we have about 20+ of them now, we are slowly repalcing the rest of our other 30+ smart boards with them as they break. Matt

I spoke to MS a few years ago and we still license RDS by what they said back then. 1 FTE CAL per member of staff 1 RDS CAL per member of FTE staff An external connector license which covers all students Hope this makes sense Matt

We are a champion school for RSConnected (KKS) we use their My Ed smartphone app, it is fantastic and provides a messaging system for the school to parent communications, it also provides access to their child's data directly from the app. Would definitely recommend their solution. Matt

You log in as rangerinstall or rangermanager Matt

SIMS is currently around 6.5GB

no this is for a academy (1000 students, 150 staff) we have around 50 staff that use sims all day with many staff logging on throughout the night doing reports, assessment/mark sheets and entering data etc. Our current SIMS server is a VM on our VMware platform and has its own dedicated physical host with 10 x 2ghz vCPUs, 40GB RAM and can still peak at 80-100% of CPU use and runs around the 30-35GB RAM (SQL takes around 25Gb, with other SIMS services eg. discover, solus etc.. taking about 5GB the rest is system use) throughout the day when our data team start analysing data and generating reports which they do all day every day. What spec are you running? what and how are you using sims? We are considering a new physical VMware host and adding SSD storage to our SANs for our SIMS server to give it more resources as performance is just not quick enough at times when people are doing SQL intensive actions and can cause other users to get the white not responding screen for a few seconds which they find very frustrating. Any thoughts are very welcome!

does anyone know roughly how much it would cost to put a SIMS server in Azure? spec e.g. 12x 2ghz cores 40gb ram 300gb storage running 24 hours a day 7 days per week?

Have the emails gone out yet?

will the url be posted here?

Hi, any news on confirmation date? Matt