GREED

Out of interest, have you viewed the other possibilities on the market? There are another half dozen decent entries... Aspen MIS to name just one.

I am really confused by your question, what aspect of it being in the cloud (as in physically stored on a remote server(s) rather than your own servers.) is causing you concern? Access to the MIS via the internet is available in varying degrees of success, for every major provider in the UK today. I think the responses above about other key and confidential services already established as a cloud solution are very supportive, perhaps you can clarify your meaning?

I think if we were all in on that we would join in @vikpaw we have nothing to hide.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! was my reaction this morning!

What you do is have an MIS that displays this in the parental portals, in fact allows the parents to make or authorise the choices made by students... just saying...

Agreed, or even worse say they can only use a CTF file and that is all they will migrate... School are not happy with that they want it all.

Ummmm... Me!!

Sounds like you have an excellent and well planned out project going forward, I wish you luck and if I am standing in front of you I will do my best to impress

In sticking well clear... I'm feeling the love from here! I am sensing you have been burned recently by MIS Software? @PhilNeal I agree totally (shock horror!), but only with a system that is setup in such a way to allow a systemic issue affect all its customers. In this topic, SIMS' isolation is a huge advantage. However if you have such a scenario in mind from the off, you design resilience and redundancy and facilities for separation into the product. At worse a single school has temporary issues without impacting on all the others. If datacenter A dies, datacenter B is still online and available. (BTW if datacenter dies with all the international banks and finance institutions inside... On a personal level I will be very concerned for my livelihood!) Just some tips for your cloud offering soon Phil (I'm kidding of course, friendly banter!)

@KK20 You are right, we cannot do EVERYTHING you ask... today... however looking carefully down your list we can come pretty darn close through our data analytics engine to support the reporting process. However, I'm not going to 'bang on' about that because you have a solution you are happy with at the front end, what you want to know is can you connect to and extract the raw data you need and when. You really want your own front end to a database built for you. And really the answer is yes you can. It would be some careful work with yourselves (as you would expect, it isn't going to switch on and 'boom' you have everything you had before). I'm always interested to hear why SMT will shriek at their database being hosted in the cloud... and while talking about it you can have it on your local servers just as easily. I won't push this any more, I wish you luck in your search and I think we would all be interested to hear how you get on!! Let us know. If... if you want to talk further on your requirements, even just to discuss and know that Aspen isn't going to fulfil your needs (if you are not certain already based on your assumptions) please do get in contact.

@CAM You can! Sort of! The report definition utilises a SQL query to return or output the information usully to a report. Although I don't think this is usually displayed (i need to check on that!) it is there. So you would be able to do this. The issue comes back to security, as such a query could return information to a user bypassing Aspen security roles so giving information they potentially should not have access too. So, yes you can, but you would need to think about this carefully before implementing. So putting into a third party app is great, but if you wanted to display the returned results on a intranet page (as I was asked yesterday) then you would need to consider the audience. EDIT: I should say before the security police start having a moan: You still need to get access to the server and the database before you get this far, so no, there is not a big security hole to worry people or for competitors to exploit! We do this often with larger customers with no issues at all!

We have a dedicated and industry standard reporting application that utilises all the framework and layout tools and allows you to create the most complex reports, including calculations, extrapolations, colours etc. Sort of professional reports any industry uses. We usually have a dedicated server for reporting (for larger customers) which will contain an optimised database for reporting, although this merely is used for the processing of the data from the core database. Think that answers your question Matt!

Got it!! haha! I would say that reports are an interesting topic. We are not like the run of the mill MIS in terms of our reporting capabilities, because we use an industry standard report framework building tool, so you truly can build any report in the way you want it. I would place good money on if you have been able to build these reports elsewhere already, Aspen reports would be able to reproduce them. I can send you (privately) some customer examples of some really complex reports. To access the database, you need to be able to connect up to the SQL tables. I'm affraid my knowledge of this is limited, obviously you need to learn the schema of Aspen to make sense of it (I have a HUGE database schema on A1 paper in my office, it is like wallpaper!)

I too am interested to know why a data export scheduled cannot do what is being asked in some cases, and why there is a need to access the database itself when you can get the same results through the interface and or exports. I'm also interested to know why it seems Aspen cannot do what is needed within the application which would remove the need for the additional seperate interface. I get it if you want to pull data from other MIS systems... but if they were all in Aspen, Aspen has a top level trust layer that culminates all data from all schools, this sits above where other MIS systems usually sit, which is at the school level.

Also... have I met you? Did I come and demo? Sorry... name to face and all that!

You do, we just do not support it if you want to make changes. We have customers who have done that fine, in fact we have even built for larger LA size customers some database to database solutions, and of course that would be available.... at a cost. Ultimately, as you come onboard and have the inclination to learn Aspen and it's database, it is yours to do with as you want. We pride ourselves on not being restrictive on the application and database, in fact we promote it.You do have to understand through that there is no business way we would be able to support every customer with every change at database level they wanted to make, without a fee in some cases. But the database if yours, and we can help you understand the database to help you write your own extractions, if the built in extraction facilities are not to your linking (we have customisable/writeable imports and exports!)

After this one? Schoolboy error!

So I take it that the intention is to keep the intranet as the front end and want to pull information into that. Aspen MIS has a very simple, easy, but full featured front end for staff, student and parents built in, because it is all cloud already. The need for an integration with such a front end potentially disappears.

Indeed Aspen MIS can be hosted on your site if you wish, even if it wasn't there are ways to get at your database we have customers who are doing that. Interested to know what you want to do with the database that means you need to get inside it, you have database level access from within Aspen, can run SQL scripts etc as much as you want. I suggest if you are wanting to modify the core database logic (which is all you would want to do and not be able to do in the application) then Aspen is not for you as we cannot support that... Not I imagine would many others. What you gain in cost savings in having it in the cloud are worth investigating. I should mention that as of our 4.9 release we are including dual factor authentication support. A big issue for cloud accessed products. @PhilNeal what is the large African animal in the room you mention? I would suggest you also check out our sticky thread on this forum or our dedicated support forum also hosted here on Edugeek - under Direct Support Forums. There is a raft of information here about the product I have already mentioned, and links to some YouTube demos. Or just ask of you have any questions! Thanks @vikpaw

Definitely! An experience I won't forget. Unexpected stop over in Dublin at 4 this morning too. Nice to land an hear they got him.

I'm home!

Taxis are up and running again

Gonna leave it until 2pm and see what the score is then

Airport is open. Just need to get there