mthomas08

Took a while.. but I did it.. achievement unlocked every time I manage to get through a whole survey without clicking X.

Cloud version in 2035, why bother worrying about it when no other competition exists. Keep using the old SIMs. Net for another 20 years at least. It cuts costs. Sack half the support staff, why bother providing good support when we can't choose another MIS.. you have a problem? sure, we can add you to the list.. you're now customer 41 in line. Hell, don't even bother with people on other end and resort to an AI bot which companies have been using for years... have you tried XYZ... what about XYZ again..... now try ABC..... Oooooo ddo XYZ again..... now do ABC AGAIN! Ugh.

Ah yes.. the slow PCs... I once tried to explain to a HT how slow PCs could be a real problem for classes. I showed her a recording me turning on PCs and logging on. It took a total 15 minutes - yes actually 15 minutes. The bio screen was slow, then Windows was slow.. then getting to the logon was slow.. and finally.. loading the profile. I said, this is what kids face every day and every lesson. Even if the PCs are booted by the teacher, it still takes like 8 minutes to logon. Considering how students get told off for being late.. how can we ignore IT.. This was one tiny segment of data I showed the HT, we had a slow network 100MB, our broadband capped on 50MB daily, WiFi areas were unreliable. So course.. you add a slow PC.. slow network.. slow internet.. unreliable servers.. (let alone a terrible device scheme alongside messy bad projector/sound/PCs in classrooms) and the excuse I got was "why replace IT for it just to fail again". Lets just say we fixed all that over the years. The sheer productivity loss would have been disgusting.

Report it to Bromcom, I'd say they may need to dedicate more resources to your school. We had a perfect system on day 1, then magically it was as if they cut our server resources... things were slow... we complained. It got better.

This. This. This. Oh and the 'here is a Teams piece of work, now print it for me'. I don't know our full printing costs but must be an average of £20K-£30K a year. Certain depts are pushing for G Suite or Teams, yet still printing en mass. What people don't fully understand is, it isn't just about print per copy.. or toner for non managed printers or even the staff hours required to maintain them.... it's the cost of the printer itself. We've just spent some money upgrading our main fleet for the summer. Then there's the biometrics on them which is an annual contract - costing us money with the print MFDs and separate biometric support. One company does the hardware - another does the software. All this money adds up and at a time when student numbers are dropping and we are having our Ofsted review (due to a bad Ofsted last year). Don't get me wrong, financially we are very well managed and doing better compared to most schools in our area - even ones doing far better on Ofsted reports. We have money left in the pot every year. Just that printing culture..... it is a culture.. lets be clear.... and all that money adds up at the end of the year.

We had email to print but it wasn't heavily used. The majority of our printing was done by staff.... and they didn't have laptops or devices.. just PCs in every classroom. They simply didn't care and would print print and.. print. The limits weren't set. Reports didn't work. It was a free 4 all.

2M pages a year. 1400 students. Just don't look at our totals since PaperCut installation.

Ohhhhhhhhh yes. When we had a device scheme, one selling point was 'we won't need to print so much'. One year.. we had the biggest invoice in my 20+ year career. It was about £32K... for one quatre... our printer budget for a year was £10K with a £5K contingency. I think that year we spent about £50K. Hell, one of those people printed off the entire documentation on a platform which was a few thousand pages and chucked it on my desk. Instead of telling me that we need to deal with password resetting so he doens't have to do it. He really didn't care when the HT said about the printer bill "oh well". We were also spending about £25K+ annually on systems we didn't need and high costs on the things we did need like broadband.

I completely believe it and don't doubt you for a second. I'd say we still have a tiny amount of waste, take printing for instance.. we still spend a fortune printing a ton every year. Wouldn't surprise me if schools are going down the route of chucking money at things not necessary.... schools that clearly have money to waste.

Ah yes.. the whole 'lets make savings'. Okay, lets get rid of XYZ... "no no we need that". Okay, how about we get rid of ABC... "no no we need all that too" Okay, I'll tender and review HIJKLMNO because I have such a great team and they can manage without me holding their hands for a bit "GREAT IDEA!" Okay, all done, we saved tons of money and have some better services. "FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!! But we need to shrink your dept and cut your budget and add to your work load". On a serious note, unless you've been chucking money out the window for kicks.. not sure how much schools will save. We generally cut a ton of the waste when I joined this place years ago. A long list of signed up systems that either didn't work or barely used. A terrible device scheme costing us tens of thousands a year. An IT system that didn't work well enough. MFDs failing and don't get me started on the print management software, a telephone systems put together with glue and tape, cashless catering biometrics needing daily reboots, a slow network (100MB) and capped out broadband connnection on 50MB. Only naming a few.... We're already going to hurt financially due to numbers dropping in September. Only thing saving us is the surplus due to how well the budget is planned.

We did at one point, then turned it off.

Totally without question marks.

Wait... what..... As an ex-governor, I'm assuming this was heavily scrutinised. The amount of times I had to confirm on paper work.. "no I don't have anything to declare" that may bring my job in to disrupte or questionable personal businesses etc etc etc. It was annoying as hell.... but completely necessary. Even during every meeting, the question had to be asked. How do I say........ I work here and have a relationship with a product we're buying..

Turns out I was way off.. they're now doing business in the US and Europe. Things have come a long way since we first joined Orbital.

You. Are. So. Lucky. Solus/SIMs server did improve after I rebuilt it, then virtualised some time later - but the random SIMs client crashes didn't go away.. especially for attendance.

I can't speak for others. SIMs: Network. Server. SIMs Solus. SQL. SIMs Client. PC. I'd say this had poor reliability for the high end users (admin). Daily crashes were normal. Performance was awful. Emergency patches = downtime plus may not fix the problem. Updates = downtime + more emegency patches and updates to fix previous updates (this started to become more and more common) Server upgrades Server migrations Backups Constantly trying to resolve the random RAM crashes that SIMs denied existed for about 18 months.. then finally admitted it. Constantly browsing EduGeek and Google to see if other schools faced the same issues (they did) and troubleshooting. Performance updates on the servers. Running scripts to resolve the data. Running SIMs tools. Trying every possible solution I find on Google by random Joe. Upgrading the PCs in attendance (one of many), new RAM.. better SSDs.. better processors... brand new machines... sending SIMs the logs... then trying to log even more... screen recording.. I had around 1000 emails recorded.. I dealt with about 3 different core developers... (the ones you rarely get to talk to).. server reboots.. Bromcom Cloud: Bromcom. Microsoft. Internet. Network. Browser related. No updates. No patches. No scripts. No messing around with the PCs. No servers. No upgrades. No backups. NO SQL licenses. No server licenses. I don't think they are truly fair comparisons.. I joined here and no one knew how to manage SIMs. I did.. because I've dealt with it since before .net framework came along. I made SIMs reliable. I gave up my free time to make it better. Bromcom doesn't random crash like SIMs. The performance related issues seem to be resolved and the last 6 months have been down to Azure issues (which also impacted a few other portals). I'd like to think they are getting better and more reliable. Last 12 months of Bromcom has been better for us Vs 3 months SIMs. Now course.. Bromcom during the 1st year = the worst. Major performance issues. Downtime every few weeks. BUT.. Bromcom in the last year = serious reliability.

Sorry to hear about that. Always weird to see school closures... we keep being told not enough schools.. not enough classrooms.. not enough teachers... A school closed some years ago about 10 miles away from me... always weird to me. Our current numbers are slowly going down so it is a concern here too but they hope the recent changes will boost it. We certainly had large numbers attend open evenings.

I wouldn't say things are better or worse with more Cloud hosted - our experience. ISP is fantastic by a mile and a half compared to the previous company. Filtering is worse off since we had no choice but to migrate to their Cloud based system. Cloud MIS had unrelaible start with performance issues - weekly. In the last 6 months, it has been a lot better even compared to an internally hosted SIMs. And the ONLY reason staff didn't notice downtime and problems with SIMs, was me doing the work at weekends and evenings. I do not miss the emergency patches from Attendance/Data Manager. If I did these during working hours, SIMs would hit a very low reliability % compared to our early days of Bromcom. This doesn't even include the performance issues or random MEMORY crashes staff suffered - which SIMs tried.. and tried for about 4 years to fix. My faith in Cloud used to be pretty low... but with experience.. it has improved a lot. I'd say it's only a step away from being more Cloud. The big difference is me not putting in extra unpaid hours to make things work.

Not sure how far ours go outside of the South East. Orbital.net Support/reliability/pricing all 10/10. No one comes close for us.

Very nice. Good job.

SBM (DPO) does that with the DSL. They do site walks to make sure everything is in order, then friendly polite reminders to staff about what they should do. SBM line managers the site engineer and they run a tight ship on door codes/keys etc. Checking the state of classrooms and wht kind of data is exposed. From us in IT, we make sure autolock exists and equipment encrypted etc. Our visitor accounts have limited access and Wi-Fi is maintained by us and everything logged.

I'm playing Pax Dei at the moment, some real potential but depends how the full release goes whenever that hits. Great to travel around and see how people build entire towns.. and every few days there are some serious changes.

Wait.. your teachers insist they use Windows? What kind of teacher breed are they? Ours insist software XYZ and even if we sneakly remove it.. within 1 day "where's XYZ!!!!". And yes.. software dating back to 2000. Ugh..

Academy 1400 students 150 staff CCTV/phones/cashless catering/biometric MFDs/bioler system/1000+ devices/iPads using Mosyle/G Suite and M365 here. I'm probably missing stuff. Team of 3.

I've setup a sheet which lists all software installed (server/local/imaged) and I try to do an annual check with departments. The SBM has the ones costing money. Problem is, unless you can persuade SLT to make sure everything goes through you... it becomes a bit of a runaround. Which reminds me - I need to do my annual chase.