mthomas08

Yes - yes - yes. I'm glad this whole thread is here, because it's very useful for a school considering a tender process for the MIS. Although the blog post is a bit scaremongering, they are valid points to consider and knowing some teachers leading the project may not even think about that list......... I am absolutely not defending them.. I find SIMs an absolute nightmare at times. The need for patches to fix problems.. a patch to fix a workstation fix which was released to fix the original update... and released during term. Performance patches and endless amount of tasks to improvement the speed of SIMs, to then realise that most of it made no difference to certain aspects of SIMs like attendance. To spend years and years trying to fix the random memory crash error and now all of a sudden.... gone. Their support has improved over the years and I prefer Solus 3 compared to the old days. BUT there are still problems with SIMs.. still generally slow at times.. and considering the overall costs involved.. it really shouldn't be like this in 2021. I can accept not having home access but the sheer slowness of the system to do certain tasks.. isn't good enough.

Is Arbor really that good? Anyone made the switch from SIMS > Arbor? We are going to tender at some point and look at the available products. SIMs seems to be consistently having one glitch after another and I like the idea of going to an online system so we don't need to run constant updates/patches and performance improvements etc.

HT got it days ago - we blocked it. Considering how it constantly talks about death and anti vaccines.... everyone should twig.. If SLT have fallen victim to this, perhaps remind them about scam emails. Things like this could have opened up your system to ransomware.

+ another here with NRS > Civica. Originally wasn't too bad but since Civica took them over.. emails don't get a response and a 30 minute wait time to talk to someone. We even had to chase regarding an engineer visit. Unfortunately we upgraded their kit before things turned out like this.. If it's down to Covid.. hopefully this time next year things will be better?..

I don't often bite at such things.. but this is a prime example of why IT fails in schools and suffer ransomware. Someone high up has made a drastic stupid decision without the prep work? I even used those two words in a governor meeting when it got mentioned. We are seriously considering a migration to O365 for email and staff share MAYBE one day the staff/student drives. Now, I have already started a list of pros/cons and this will go to those above. Sorry I have not read through the replies but I do believe there are companies that can provide an AD sync (if you don't have it) and help migrate everything over. If this is to be, I would do it through someone because there are all sorts to consider. I've not been through all the settings of G Suite but it is pages and pages. Edu hobnobs need to be sent your way. Breath... breath..... breath........

Now back on to my priority radar - inconsistent and seems to be getting a tad bit worse. Something I didn't even think about (you can do this manually by deleting the SIMs folder in my documents). Improved my SIMs but we are now nearly end of day. Login to SIMS .net as the affected SIMS user. Go to: Tools > Setups > User Options. Under panel 3 - Visual Settings, check the option 'Clear My SIMS Documents on Log Off' and click Save at the top. Go to: Focus > Exit Please bear in mind that the SIMS client can 'hang' and take longer than it usually does to close down. Please do not force the application to close and leave it until it has finished. Once it has been closed down, if you then log back into SIMS .net and try saving the record or data again (that previously took a long time to save), then this should be noticeably quicker. Additional Comments Whilst you can leave this option enabled within SIMS .net, it might be best to un-check it again, as there is the possibility that this can cause the SIMS client to take longer to close down. Two links here might help - from the capita support site. Going to be running through some bits at the weekend. https://support.capitasoftware.com/csm?sys_kb_id=508df7b8dbbd0094003c4872ba96199e&id=kb_article_view&sysparm_rank=1&sysparm_tsqueryId=bb1949051b2e70d458418591f54bcbdc https://support.capitasoftware.com/csm?sys_kb_id=66f7b6571b9f60107c9fed79b04bcb3e&id=kb_article_view&sysparm_rank=6&sysparm_tsqueryId=bb1949051b2e70d458418591f54bcbdc

Very weird problems. We recently installed a new server for SIMs and the Xporter installation with Wonde all went fine. Didn't have to make any registry changes but made sure everything was installed that SIMs needed (all those little tick boxes add roles/features etc). We had firewall issues but that caused a problem with the deployment of SIMs. Our other exporters like EduLink work fine.

I hope to god this isn't just a rehash like we had with the Star Wars sequels..... Enjoyed the entire Matrix even the sequels.. okay minus the whole architect concept.

Our SIMs has generally always been slow and we have been through the process of rebuilding the server and now migrated to a brand new virtual server. The server performance barely gets a scratch. The only performance change is the installation process - this is now very fast compared to before. SIMs faster to load? nope. Things I've tried to help the performance with no change: SIMs performance patches I think they are the (22573) (20647) Orphaned documents + document links cleaned up *edit* avoid pressing this during term time - ours actually freezes SIMs Attendance data archived SQL fully updated Windows updated Disks all fine Plenty of memory I am considering asking Capita to provide a patch to remove all old documents but looking at the research, this can actually break it... Also add, I don't think this has anything to do with the ini files. They can copy over instantly - likewise for site wide deploying of updates (this process has now become very fast). The problem surely lies within or how SIMs accesses the SQL data. Still, if anyone has anymore ideas......

Just like petrol... quick to increase prices but slow to drop them. Council tax UP £20 a month from two years ago Energy bills UP roughly £25 a month from two years ago Petrol UP £30 a month from one year ago I'm estimating our water/waste bill will be up about £40 compared to what it was 2 years ago. Something is very wrong with this country among many other things... This doesn't even include our food costs going up and we still do our best to buy everything from Aldi/Lidl. I even have an ECO car with £20 tax a year, we went down the route of buying more eco friendly appliances and bulbs... and still look at us. We've cut down takeaways and rarely have weekend breaks and holidays anymore.....

We've been blocking a lot of repetitive sales reps and magically enough... our external calls have dropped by about 95%. Every supplier I speak to seem to have little to no idea about the DFE devices. Although there has been the daily anonymous caller which we refuse to answer. Majority of our laptops have come back - i don't think there is many left to be returned. Had about... 5 I think.. damaged. We are now considering our options on what to do with them. The worst one was the nice HP completely in bits.. apparently.. the laptop got caught in a major family feud.

Sounds like your school needs some GDPR training One key factor is the level of personal data. A photo or biometric is considered to be a very high level/sensitivity. A first name is practically almost nothing - after all.. knowing my name is Dave doesn't narrow down who I am.. yet a photo would... or my full name and address and medical information... What would happen if a parent made a SAR - subject access request? https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-of-access/ I would recommend on giving the ICO website a very good read - its got a ton of information. Some schools have access to legal teams and are very good at dealing with questions on GDPR - our legal team have been great on the finer details but our DPO has been fully trained on GDPR.

Agreed. The IT team just need to setup the schedule properly and nothing else is needed. We have a task that runs first thing in the morning and not long before lunch time and installed on the SIMs server. *start a program* "C:\Program Files (x86)\ParentPay\MISSync.exe" /sims /quiet *run with highest privileges and configure for Vista/server 2008/ You can also check the schedule history which will show when it ran last etc. There isn't really a lot of settings needed.

School has money problems and you are looking to spend a bit just to remind teachers to take registers... If this was a problem here - talking with the Governor hat on.... I would be concerned. I think you are going to be lucky to find something very cheap or free to do this and is reliable. I used Netsupport some years ago and it was cheap compared to other products but still an expense. Not something I would consider buying for this.. It must be part of their routine. If they can forget this.. what else can they forget? Sorry - I know this doesn't help you!

Orbital > FreePBX > Yealink phones. No complaints.

Agreed - very sad news. Some of his one liners were.. questionable but I don't think he meant offense. He always reminded me of my grandad and wouldn't take long for anyone to warm up to him.

I was impressed with our initial HP DFE laptops but since then.. I don't know if things got bad or just terribly worse.. Netbooks > terrible screen size to work effectively. Celeron > does the DFE ever work on IT? You can literally feel the slowness when attempting to run anything for the first time Geobooks > celeron and netbooks! Ever tried to run a teams meeting on these and load up a few word documents... Dynabooks - just a big screen version of the Geo. Dell - Seem to be a nice version of a netbook but we haven't rebuilt these yet. We struggled to image them and have a few dell USB > ethernet bits ordered. And don't get me started on the first lot of instructions with /.local user etc.... Things like this frustrate me because it shows an absolute lack of experience with kids and schools. We had schemes over the years and that really showed us a thing or two.

Dabbed in teaching and adult learning and used to run the IT clubs. I do miss some of it but now I just don't have that level of time.

Too many great memories and will always be the voice of F1.

Why not start at the basics? Use social media and create your own portfolio to advertise your services. If you have the expertise behind you, you could easily advertise it and get it out there. Keep your job.. spend a few hours in your home time to build that portfolio.. get everyone you know to share it.. The risk and cost will be minimal. List all the technical babble and translate that in to English for the non IT literate. Sooner or late a school might pick up on it and ask for advice. That 1 school could turn in to 10. You can take it steady and see how things go and offer more down the line. With no staff employed, you can keep the charges to a minimal too.

Fantastic example of tabloid click bait headlines with no evidence. Stories like this shouldn't be allowed or forced to have "OPINION PIECE NOT FACT" in the title. I miss the days as a kid, seeing tabloid stories of "alien abductions" or "Elvis slept with me last night and I was instantly 9 months pregnant"....... You know.. the kind of stories that even The X-Files laughed at... Oh how those were ridiculed.... now stories like this are written as if they are fact with zero substance and allowed to spread this misinformation. So strange though how everything went offline. Just goes to show that not even a billion pound company has IT setup correctly - at least I tell myself this when we go down.

If signing in - they will need the free license and I think its the Office 365 A1 for students or the A1 for faculty. Guest access should work if you've enabled it and doesn't require to sign in. In the license section of 365 admin centre you can view the specific apps they have access to. Microsoft Teams should be there. It can take time to assign though once you've ticked the boxes.

We got some of these and to be fair.. they could be worse. Our device scheme back in the day had cheap £200-£250 netbooks with the old style HDDs and these were very slow and aged badly. The geobook is far better in comparison, the build quality is better and generally they do feel good. Not the fastest thing on earth but they are netbooks. A standard SSD would have been a good idea but they are what they are. The previous HP laptops we got were perfect but assuming the geobooks cost a lot less. We are not installing nothing and just dishing them out. So far we had one returned, it seemed to be setup incorrectly with passwords already set. Considering they are free and do not cost us anything, I don't want to complain.

+1 for Microsoft Teams and EduLink

Maybe I'm talking simple Simon here but, what about a simple Virtual Meeting like Teams? The question popped up for us about something similar - with a public speaker to our main hall and restaurant (two large spaces) for staff. I simply said, stick a webcam with a mic in the hall and that should work with Teams to our restaurant. Nice and simple. In fact we could setup that system right now, create the meeting and send out the link. That can run non stop to make sure everyone knows what they are doing. And if you schedule it through Outlook, I believe the link won't change so it will just work.