coolhands

Jeez I don’t wanna change away from sims - all the reports and various things that are set up to come out of it (eg for data analysis reports we make after each year group data collection). It would mean starting again, don’t know if I can take it

No idea but try tools>validate memberships, might help with the being able to save edit pupil details problem

So it's going to be something to do with that SIMS ID thing isn't it. Which has always been weird in my experience - you know the whole options online registration nightmare, where students can log in using google or MS etc as long as they click the correct obscure button on first use, but if they enter their school email address then it will create a different sign in method for them (SIMS ID) and anyone trying to help the kids log in ends up in the mire forevermore. Pants

Hmm sims was new install here in 2018, data was migrated into it from CMIS though. 2000 students. What can I do do reduce the size then, I know I can do the archive attendance marks, but anything else? Doubt if that will have much effect. Solus primary ldf size is 38Gb; mdf 50MB. sims.mdf yes appears to be 50.1GB looking in program files>SQL server folder. So do I need to get it 10GB below the available RAM size?

thanks. How can I find the size of the database please? Is it the '49838'MB shown in this pic (which is right click, properties of the sims database shown on the left)? But if that is, and it's 50GB then it is already bigger than the available RAM

In task manager the memory is running continuously at 44.4GB out of 48GB available. Any advice that I can pass on to out IT to reduce RAM? I know the memory can be limited in SQL server management studio (our is currently 2147483647 (in MB) in the 'maximum server memory' box so I guess it's never been limited?) (Also is the database size excessively large?) reson I'm asking is I was asked to run patch 22573 as part of this ongoing transaction deadlocked error issue (20647 ran ok) and it fails as it times out. Suggestion from our support company is to get IT to improve the RAM usage. I'm just pondering how they can do that though (haven't asked them yet)

One member of staff (teacher) is still having same problem, so not convinced the patch solved whatever is the background problem.

Between Monday evening and Wednesday evening a date of birth was deleted for a member of staff from SIMS (I was alerted as LGFL emailed me an error as it syncs 3 times a week via a scheduled report). Since this can't be done in person (as if you delete the DOB the box goes red and SIMS won't let you save) then this must have been done by a 3rd party system that can write-back to sims. Salamander investigated (as my first port of call) but they don't write DOB back to sims, and also they checked their logs, so it wasn't them. But how can I find what other 3rd party apps / providers do? We use edulink, classcharts, inventry. Can inventry write back a date of birth? How can I know? But other systems I might not know about might exist from before my time eg I know they used 'satchel one' in the past, and obviously there are other current apps that use wonde to get info like senca, sparx etc but none of those kind of platforms can write back - I've checked permissions on wonde of every app we have. Any thoughts?

I got the patch issued to me yesterday from our support provider. Installed last night fingers crossed. The transaction deadlocked seemed to be hitting a few teachers in particular, just when doing their ordinary registers which is a bit weird.

As I already put, 28th June. The July reference is for Year 12 or 13, not Year 11, so there is some miscommunication there.

If you put the off roll date as 28 June which is the right date, then there won't be any attendance codes to enter. So maybe go back and enter a new off roll date (assuming you had a later off roll date) Routines>Students>Leavers, click search, sort on the Date of Leaving header to hopefully get the whole lot together using whatever date you did use eg 30 July or whatever. Then select them all and input new date of leaving and new reason for leaving, assign to all. Hopefully it will sort it. Do one kid first as a test.

1) yes (I will retest it, but I have tested it before when I was having some queries) 2) don’t know but seems a good thought that that might be the problem

Short answer is no. But it doesn't take long to import them as usually you wouldn't have too many, assuming you are importing ctfs from primary schools. However if you have generated your own ctf eg for ULNs then you wouldn't generate a separate ctf for each ULN you require (and therefore have lots of ctfs to download, with each ctf containing only one student) - as when generating a ctf for ULNs then you can create one single ctf which contains eg whole year group. Then when the ULNs are generated they are all contained within the single ctf you would download and import. Ignore that if you aren't talking about ULNs.

thanks, and do you think I can go straight to patch 4 or should I install patch 2 first and then immediately update it to 4?

Hi Can this ever be done during the school day (via solus)? Or does / would it kick users out etc and therefore should only be done out of school hours? I want to install CWP4 but am not sure. Also, I just realised when investigating issues that CWP2 which I thought I installed in August failed due to 'Tolerance not met for target SIMS Database'. So can I install CWP4 even though 2 is not even installed ie go straight from zero to 4? They say Schools can upgrade to CWPsu4 regardless of whether they applied CWPsu2 or CWPsu3. as they probably assume everyone has 2 as a minimum!

Check the ‘result set’ is unlocked. Eg it may be called Y9 Data 1 or something like that, you can see the name in the column header.

No. You would have to clone the original group eg Registration Tutor and call it eg ABC Registration Tutor (where ABC is your school letters or similar) and then on this cloned version you remove that ability. Then this cloned version is the one you assign to all teachers and you remove the original SIMS one from their accounts.

You could write a report and add the looked after field. You can get it to output end date iirc so you could then run it for eg Y11 and it would show who had it in the past as you would see the end date

Maybe go back to previous model that was accepted, make one minor tweak and see if you can upload? Might be something you’ve done with the failure model that can’t be accepted.

I have it set up as scheduled task, at 6am and something like 5pm each day. I and one admin staff also have the MISSync on our desktop so we can manually do it if necessary plus we add staff of course (which can only be done manually)

Will have to design your academic calendar around likely high peak demand! Do reports in September etc when there is plenty of capacity

On the other hand I may have over complicated your idea - you could perhaps do something like what you want as you can rank within sims. So you can get it to look at the test results, rank the students and then you could probably assign a value against various boundaries. Eg if ranked 1 to 15 in the cohort give them band 1a etc. but I don’t think will work very well as you will find clumps of students within certain mark ranges, and get a lumpy output I expect. My gut feeling is would not be great output even if you got it working.

I did not find a way. I do something similar which is simply (!) looking at high mid low prior attainers and seeing if they are underperforming by using quartiles of the marks scored. So very similar to your idea. The problem as you will also have is that each subjects range of marks varies. ie in an easy test all students get between 50 and 90%, in a hard test, they all score between 5 and 40%. So in my case we find the median and lower quartile of the range of marks for that subject, then if the high prior attainer does not get higher than the median, we classify them as underperforming. If mid prior attainer falls in the lower quartile, we classify them as underperforming. This is essentially what you are wanting to do. It takes an extensive amount of time to be able to write these formulas in excel, because you have all students (of a year group) taking many subjects. You need to calculate the quartiles and median for each subject then see if each student falls below the threshold according to their individual result, and if they’re a high or mid prior attainer to then classify them as underperforming or not. That is all hard enough and you can see I only use high / mid / low, and a simple underperforming yes or no according to their result vs their ability band. Yours is the same idea (I think) but you’ve taken it up to 11 as you want more and finer grade thresholds. I suggest it would be too difficult and baring in mind the inaccuracy of different department tests that they make the students sit, not any better anyway. Long and short can do in excel, could never do it all within sims, we did investigate but no chance.

the permissions tree is a nightmare and often doesn't work / make sense. Say you need someone to be able to send intouch sms messages but not various other things etc. Giving staff certain specific access is nearly impossible and that stupid sims permissions sheet is no help

There is a patch 28870 /forums/mis-systems/172151-parentpay-mis-sync-cant-see-pre-admissions-sims-2.html