coolhands

How can you do a tendering process at this stage? There's not enough time to properly evaluate the competitors etc and go through a whole tendering process and potentially go to an alternative if you weren't expecting this? Impossible. So the tendering process is moot cos we're going to have to renew! But frankly them doing this encourages one to look for an alternative MIS in 3 years time as this is disgraceful conduct. And I'm happy to sit with what i know (ie sims) but this actually makes me want to go. Absolute t0$$3rs

Ok following my previous success (eventually!) (see here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/221777-can-wonde-sync-parentpay-if-not-what-can.html )of getting parentpay to sync automatically everyday using windows task scheduler - next wish would be to create the letters or email login details to the parent automatically. Is that possible from within parentpay? If so how? At the moment we have to manually log onto parentpay and do a very weird method to produce a set of pdf letters, which then we download and stick in a shared folder, so the Year team can extract the new students 'letter' and give to them for their parents. What a massive ****ache. (on parentpay we have to click on Communication>Email & SMS> open a recent template name, click click click through to eventually 'send message' even though it doesn't send a message it creates a pdf (of course! WTF?) which we can then download. So, in short, how can I email new accounts automatically by the magic of parentpay website?

Tools>Other Schools search for the school and you can put whatever you want into the box. I don't believe the URN is a req field so some of ours are blank.

thanks. Had IT guy with me just now, he couldn't get the service to stay running no matter what he did. So given up now & I've submitted the log to capita on my case. So will hopefully see some answers!

Hi everyone our IT chap has not been able to set the 'SOLUS3 Agent Service' to 'Started' in the status column in services.msc - can anyone confirm if yours has 'Started' in that column all the time or not? If so why would ours keep switching it off. He said "I've tried restarting it but it simply stops again after a few seconds." From the capita help article (which was their response to my case) they put: It is also worthwhile checking that the Solus3 agent service on the Server is “Started”. If not go into Services.msc, scroll down to find the Solus3 agent, and check the status Column, if this is blank, right click on the line and select “Start” Here is the article capita sent me to: https://support.capitasoftware.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sys_kb_id=0efec6ff1b4fe010fe688551f54bcbce I feel completely stuck here as it's not being fixed

thanks all. Problem with this is if we do any suggestions (like right now) we can't 'try' it cos everyone will be getting an update during school day lol. Annoying. So will have to wait until after school again (have now in third day with this). With the above - who would generally do that I assume it would be the IT team (ie our IT people in the school?). We have capita service agreement and obviously they do literally nothing. (I posted a other thread recently about our huge backups folder. I delete some of the old ones, but they are not being managed / compressed by anyone. Who would I ask to do that?). Planning on moving to SchoolICT as our support company but that won't be until next April, and I understand they will do all this sort of stuff.

Hi. We cannot update to the summer release 7.2 as SOLUS3 gives the above message. We've switched solus off & on again but still failed. Any ideas I can pass to my IT team while I wait for capita to respond? I need it to do the census. Currently on spring release 7.198. I did notice it has 'Automatic' in services.msc and I saw an old post mentioning that (can / should it be set to 'run'?) but obviously we had no problems up till now so I assume that isn't the cause.

thanks, I deleted the 2019 ones initially and no problems so far! On a similar note if you could tell me - whenever I install a patch I ask IT to do a backup first as this is (I think) recommended somewhere. But I notice when you go to actually install the patch (using database upgrade tool) it performs a backup. So is the initial backup I ask IT to do a waste of time?!! I assume so.

Sims server storage is over 96% full (35GB left of 899GB) 684GB is coming from the backup folder. should we manually delete old backups - is that the case? if so which ones / how many etc? How is this sort of thing normally dealt with? (I am not IT so don't know how this type thing is normally done). Some of the backups go back to 2019.

HR / the head want an individual staff absence report that can be run and shared with each member of staff (to show their absences). Is there any built in or do I have to Design Report my own one? So each report would need to output to a separate word page I guess.

Hi. yes it seems you are right. Or the parent can change their email address while logged onto parentpay (but in some cases trying to communicate with the parent is extremely difficult - I was trying to pin down "which email address do you use when you log into parentpay"? (which they had managed as they had added some money) and it was like pulling teeth. So the chance of them successfully changing their own email address is slim to none

Hi. I'm confused. I have changed a parent's email in SIMS, and set it as Main and Primary (are these 2 'flags' required for parentpay by the way? I seem to remember one of them is). I have done an MISSync. But since I want to check if the new email was used I would like to see the report that MISSync uses. But here's my confusion - if I run the manual report (in sims) Reports>Design Reports>Focus>student 'ParentPay2018' (or the 2015 or 2020 versions) it does not have an email field as one of the Data fields. So in other words it wouldn't upload the email. But how can that be? I know MISSync goes into sims directly, so I assume it does pull out an email address when it is run. So am I right that I cannot see the email that is picked up and used by parentpay? Also, related question - once the parent has used (a different) email and verified it / used it etc will me changing their email in sims change the one that is recorded in Parentpay or does it ignore it? Ie once they've used it they are stuck with it unless they manually change it themselves while logged onto Parentpay?

cant see anything where you say "the error given is:" did you mean to add an attachement? (not that I can help, I don't know)

I don’t like the reports cos they often seem crazily confusing when trying to get out what you want. In this case I want to get out student Medical Conditions > Description. But some students have more than 1 medical condition. So when I output the report (as a word mailmerge) it only has the 1st condition. How do I get out the 2nd and 3rd conditions? If I add the blue Medical Conditions box again, it just outputs the same item. If I untick the stupid little ‘Display first record only’ on the select data fields page then it wants to output it as 3 complete outputs (if the child has 3 medical conditions). I just want Eg Child A, Hayfever, Eczema, Asthma Any ideas

The people that make these things must have the IQ of a turnip. We’ve stopped using parentapp and now use edulink

ok answered my own question - it is in System manager, Manage Users > 4. Permissions, Group Manager, User Defined, View or Edit (All) needs to be enabled by adding them to a suitable group eg Pastoral Manager.

I have a member of staff who can see 1 UDG (we have for SEN EHCP students) and cannot see another (which is for SEN K students). Both groups have active current pupils assigned and exist in exactly the same format. How can they see one but not the other? I can't see anywhere I give 'access' to her to see it. Also, I'm pretty sure she could see both UDGs last year (they are not new groups) Any ideas?

We always have to restart the sims server after we've done sims updates as wonde fails to connect after the updates. So my suggestion is restart the sims server.

I appear to have a gap in my posts between 2012 and 2019, but I'm pretty sure I made posts in that time. Why am I not seeing them?

yes thanks now I know where that report was hidden I've done the same, going to use YAMM to email parents. Shame the downloadable report doesn't include the UPNs (which are uploaded) to make matching easier.

Question: can anyone point me to where I can download these activation codes from parentpay?

after googling this problem today, I find out I already replied to it before! Still absolute c4£p

Using cr£ppy parentpay - we normally create letters as pdf for new students. This generates the letters all as one long pdf each child a separate page within the pdf. The page has the parent carer details and student name at the top and half way down has the Username and Password. Question: Can I get a report or excel file etc out of parentpay with this info? Reason being I want to email it to parents rather than post a huge number of actual printed pages home.

not sure. As well as your method you could go into each one and reset password, then save. That way they can't actually log in. If this is to stop teachers seeing their timetables for next year there may be a different way though? After the timetable has been sent you can send across another version of the timetable (same as first) but with all blocks unbuilt (I think - just check this as it is off the top of my head).

yes that is ticked! But still shows as ex-user in the Find User display! edit actually in the staff area her employment details show new start date of 1/9/2021 so perhaps come that date she will 'go live' - I will see!