penfold_99

HI All Is anyone else have trouble importing results from ocr? All results are failing when imported into SIMS.net

Hi, We currently have ema for sims.net and the people responsible for it don't use it, the website is much better. The main issue it there is no select all, you have to individually set every student payment. On the website there is a select all function then you only have to sort out the one you don't want to pay. As for cost i dont know as this was in place before i was in post.

Try adding the "." in to the queary then you will construct the string correctly $query5 ="INSERT INTO hardware VALUES('',' . $departmentid .',' .$roomid .',' . $equiptmenttype . ',' . $serialnumber . ',' . $suppilername .',' . $price .',' .$present')";

The reason i went a bit off topic was to illustrate the investment from a school has to make to follow the upgrade path of SIMS.net. As Phil Neal cannot justify spending 1% of his total revenue to implement OO or Open Standards it is costing schools £31,5000,000 to purchase MS Office every time an upgrade is needed. Another problem Capita has is a scatter gun approach to data output. There is currently these following outputs HTML - Lesson Monitor Reports RTF - Quick Letter & Reports DOC - Reports XML - Individual Reports, Assessment Manager XLS - Reports TXT - Reports I would be use full if Capita could implement two file formats ODF and ODS, then any product that supports these format can open them, so removing the reliance on MS Office.

Hi Phil We're not asking to move from SQl Server, i was just illustrating the level of investment from the schools end. From you example of £2.60 per pupil, I will re arrange my assessment. 22,500 x 250 (Average Pupil Number) x £2.60 is still £14,625,000 a year so 1% would be £146,250 still enough to hire a couple of good developers to tackle this issue.

Thanks Phil for your support with the poll. I would also like to thank you for your commitment to debate on this subject, as many have express on this forum that my stance on this issues might alienate you from coming on here. The one big draw back to the vote on the site is it doesn't take into account members who look after multiple schools, are only able to vote once. There will never be 100% endorsement of an idea, but the ratio stands at 4:1 in favour of OpenOffice Support. You have 22,500 customers and current 40 people have voted in favour and yes it currently states at 0.2%. But have Capita canvassed there customer base to gauge level of support for Open Office support or Open Standard support? A better place for this vote would be on the capita website but as the original change request has gone missing, a second one had to be created. (thanks matt40k) Could the votes already cast on change request 0807-371441 be merged with 0807-374055 If I was building a new AM, Profiles etc I would ensure that Open Standards were built in from the start but we are where we are. Remember Phil it isn’t cheap for schools to continue purchasing Microsoft Licences for Office, Windows (Sever & Desktop), SQL Cals etc. As a very rough estimate you have 22,500 customers averaging out at £2250 per customer each per year for SIMS.net licence, (I have used a rough average as I don’t know your breakdown for Primary/Secondary), this equates to £50,625,000 a year. Can you really say you can’t invest 1% (£506,250) in supporting Open Standards/Open Office? Schools have had to fork out roughly £4510 (40 Pc Average per School) to continue to use SIMS.net the brake down is as follows Per Site £70 per Windows 2003 Licence £30 per SQL Server Licence Per Machine £70 per Windows XP Licence £35 per Office Licence £3 per XP Cal £3 per SQL Cal (THESE FIGURES ARE A ROUGH GUESS FROM OUR SELECT LICENCE COSTS, IF ANYONE HAS FIRM PRICES LET ME KNOW AND I WILL RECALCULATE) Multiply this up to your customer base of 22,500 the cost is £101,475,000 following the upgrade path of SIMS.net over the last 2 years. If schools could just save on the Office licence costs it would equate to £31,500,000 or £1400 per school. It’s very useful for schools to have this information about attendance and behaviour, but if there isn’t any money (because they have had to spend it on MS Office licences) to tackle it, the information looses all it’s value.

CALLING ALL VOTERS!! If you look after multiple schools please could you post the number of schools you look after and which way you voted as we can adjust the result to show a true level of support.

I tried to find your change request but i get this message "No Change Requests found matching the specified criteria. Please refine the criteria and Search/Print again" Have capita pulled the change request?

I have asked phil neal to quantify this.

Can a poll be created on Capita Support, as i haven't been able to create one.

I have asked Phil Neal to quantify this on another post.

Have you cast you vote? http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/22094-sims-net-support-openoffice.html Hopefully if enough people vote capita might sit up and take notice!

If there isn't a worthy deterant for Microsoft, they will continue to abuse there market position and they will build in the cost of the fines into every product sold in the EU. The wouldn't be any reason for schools to stop using Office overnight just they wont be able to purchase new copies. A ban would only work if it was 2 years or greater and that is never going to happen. The question is how to get microsoft to play a level field? It's currently sloped so much in there favour any restriction would have to be in place for what 5+, 10+ years so every thing else can catch up.

Tonyoung, If the community view about products is alienating suppliers then the suppliers has a serious problems! The suppliers should not run an hide from criticism they should engage in debate and together with the community create a better product. There can argue that there is collusion between Microsoft and Capita. As currently Capita solely use Microsoft Technologies. SIMS.net is written in .Net Uses MS SQL Server Uses IIS/MOSS for SIMS.net Learning Gateway Integration with Active Directory Integration with Microsoft Office Only run on Windows Platform Because of the use of Microsoft Technologies it stifles competition in several areas Desktop OS, Server OS, Database Software, Word Processing Software etc. Schools are forced to buy into the expensive Microsoft upgrade cycle. Some LEA's can also be included in this collusion, as many solely support Microsoft technologies and SIMS.net. Becta have reported Microsoft to the OFT (19 October 2007) and so far nothing has happened, Microsoft has been reported to the EU Commission and fined but there practises still continue. You could argue under EU law Microsoft should be excluded from all public tenders as they have been fined. In theory schools should be band from purchasing Microsoft software, but due to a loop hole they aren't. Microsoft has gagged Becta from publishing the details of the three-year megadeal it agreed with Microsoft in April. Microsoft gags UK schools - The INQUIRER Even thou as part of the tender clause was the information could be release under a FOI request. If there was an agreement between Capita and Microsoft, Microsoft would do every thing in it's power to keep it confidential and Capita would be bound not to say anything if it wanted to.

We're add it in once the count poll has finished

Capita would go with the easy option and use Microsoft Office to generate Office Open XML which doesn't even adhere to the ISO standard, so OpenOffice or any other OSS wont be able to read it.

I have created a poll to canvas the view of edugeek users. Should SIMS.net support OpenOffice to the same level as Microsoft Office? Please use the link below to vote. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/22094-sims-net-support-openoffice.html

The poll is in response to Phil Neal's, quote I am asking for your view on should SIMS.net support OpenOffice to the same level as Microsoft Office?

Phil, If you have read my post, you should understand why xml file don't open in anything else Have you looked into this? Given your answer What would you constitute as High/Medium demand? No. of schools requesting it? etc

It will depend on what vm software you are using and what os your have on your host machine.

Mcshammer_dj, the main issue as per the link on my other post is the use of .xml files. If capita changed .xml to another format open office would work a lot better.

Hi Phil, Capita do force the use MS office, as you stated above MOST outputs can go to OpenOffice not ALL. Anything less than ALL denotes use of MS Office or MS Office Viewer is required! I have detailed in this post http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/18628-capita-get-into-bed-uniservity-2.html#post185340 changes that are needed to allow ALL outputs to OpenOffice. But apparently your "still investigate" the above post, more like stuffed in the bottom draw under the Microsoft-Capita Contract forcing Capita to use Microsoft technologies while paying lip service to Open Source so the OFT won't investigate a blatant case of State funding of Microsoft by the back door.

I'm in the process of collecting the TA for KS3 and reporting them to the NAA, I am putting the results in there respective aspects ie EN TA: English Subject Level KS3, i have done this for all subject but can't find the equivalent for reading writing and speaking for english. Does anyone know which aspect they should go in so it will be picked up in the ctf files?

I'm going to check them out at the latitude festival in couple of weeks, not sure what all the hype is about thou.

We're currently looking at the ibm ds3400 with 4 fibre cards and 3tb split 70/30 for sata/sas and it's coming in about 6-8k. For virtualisation we are looking at kvm as it free which will save us a hat full of money.