matt40k

I'm afriad what your trying may not be possible. SIMS is a complex system and creating a new SIMS database is difficult task. Saying otherwise would be insulting to the many people who have dedicated their careers to it. If you are a third party who is looking at supporting it, you'll need a direct support agreement with Capita, you'll get a copy of their training database which the Capita training team has spend countless hours creating over the years, the alternative path is to "partner" with a school and use them as your guinea pig. Without knowing your end goal it's difficult to give specfic advise. What do you want to get out of this sample data? Are you looking at supporting SIMS? Or just how to manage SIMS from a techy point of view?

Linky: TidyBackups - Download: TidyBackups Also has the ability to compress (zip), makes them about a 1/5 of the uncompressed size.

He's the old ones, I really need to re-write it however.

It's on the list to be fixed\finished. Your not the only one asking, its just a question of finding the time to sit down and finish coding it. I've also got to do the email\telephone overwrite - so you can change the current main\primary contact. eg: [email protected] primary \ main becomes [email protected] when you import [email protected] primary \ main

Teachers won't need a mapped drive - it'll just be the bursar and office staff. Should make the whole system more secure if you limit who has the s drive - which should be only 5-10 odd users, even in a large secondary school.

Attendance letters seems to spring to mind, as do exams, fms (if you use it), nova-t, options etc (the v6 modules that aren't .net)

@BKGarry @CyberDrac - he's changed jobs so I'm not sure if he'll ever finish it. I'll poke him next time I see him.

That is a dangerous idea - "but I've always done it like that". Anyway, I digress off topic.

You don't need a SIMS drive\folder to take the registers. If you've got a two-way trust then the hard bit is done. If they're setup SOLUS3 you just add the machines into the console and it'll install SIMS. Job done - well other then issuing staff user\pass and doing training.

Nope - Wrote a bit about why over here -> http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/140220-microsoft-sql-best-practices-101-a.html#post1218290 Write a SIMS .net report, use the command line tool to schedule it, write a script to upload it - bing bang boom, you've done it. PS: Not sure Wordpress is ideal for this sort of thing. Something like Moodle would be better. LOADS of products out their will give you want you want.

You might lose funding, might gain funding!! - depends on SLT - more doors open up in a disaster, depends how they deal with it. In terms of hardware failure and no backups, I would argue however if they couldn't get good backup in the first place, they might not be the right people to get you extra funds, it's not difficult to put together a good business case for a solid offsite backup solution! OfSted might ask the question a few more questions about your disaster recovery plans, really depends how well you deal with it - if you had to close for days, I would expect parents to complain and they'll bump the school up the list of schools to be inspected. Can't image they'd like the idea of being pulled anyway to go investigate at the last moment, so they'd be a bit more indepth. In terms of failings - ie the technician didn't replace the hard drive when it was erroring and having a valid backup - I'd expect the governers\slt\la to ask for a investigation to find out was it their fault or was they're hands tied - ie no budget. But yer, civilization as we know it won't end - just be a really hard few years.

I'm laughing cause your idea of how low impact losing your MIS system is. Speaking from experience - yes, the school can stay open - data collection sheets are almost always paper based, so that's student details, contact info and basic medical info covered. If your LA school, you'll be able to get a CTF from them, if they do your payroll, you could be fine - least you won't have all the staff after blood cause they haven't been paid. Finance records are indeed going to replicated, at least on paper. But these needs to re-keyed into the system - in the right order, correctly - else your going to get problems, ie restore from back and re-enter cause it doesn't match the central system. You've also just guaranteed yourself a visit from the external auditors every year for the next 6 years - and they will be grilling you for at least 3 years on backups and disaster recovery, add the census queries if you're pupil\staff data has magically changed from last years. Not sure about you, but I'm not sure I'd be happy if I worked in the office\finance and got told, oh bad news, we've lost our MIS system, but don't worry, we have enough info to stay open, you just need to re-enter a few fields - right so on top of the million and one things you normally do, you need to work with one arm behind your back - ie you have to hunt for every bit of info rather then it just being on the screen in front of you - but you have to fill in those "few" missing fields, those fields that turn a CTF from MBs into a GBs SQL database!! So yes, I find your relax idea of how "easy" it is to recover from funny.

You'll be suprised how little data the DfE actually wants when push comes to shove. Still might affect your funding if you leave too many columns null

ROFL!! I nearly fell off my chair when I read this.

Yer, there is that too Yer, not sure how logically to do it, few ideas I had was to tack it onto a conference - might give you a better chance of getting work to let you go conference which is a bonus. Will see, still an idea at the moment. Be good to get it done in time for (realistic rollout of) SQL 2014.

It's a difficult question to answer to what looks like a simple Q&A, the simple answer is, it's just bad a idea that can lead to a large bill. Now I appreciate this is a rubbish answer, personally I would take that as a challenge if it wasn't being said by someone I respect as my elder in terms of experience. The other answer I hear is, it will break if Capita (the supplier) changes the tables or views - they don't publish any documentation regarding data structures - so although this is a valid answer, it's not ideal - just confirm, if your going to commit to such customisation your school should be committing to hiring someone skilled in the art of database design and should be paying as such, it's not a question of if you can do it (and willing to do it for your salary), it's a question of if they can hire someone else to replace you for when you leave. My main reason for not doing it is two things - auditing and security. So using the SA account is a bad idea, right? No one disagrees that running a "select" statement as the super administrator user is a bad idea? Or do I need to borrow a quote from my buddy Yoda - "Everything! SA is the path to the dark side. Select leads to update. Update leads to delete. Delete leads to no data. I sense much permissions in you." So lets explain a little how a user is created in SIMS .net - the "Data Manager" goes into System Manager and creates a user - this can either link to a Windows User or use SQL auth - then selects from a list of security groups. So lets pick SQL auth - that being the most common - so great we've got our user, created in the correct manner (for SIMS .net), we've been limited to say, pupil attendance data - we can't see staff bank details and we can't see pupils home details and so on. Happy days. Or is it? OK, so the "data manager" has given you a username and password but you can't login in, you can via SIMS .net however, you change the password, still can't login via SQL Management Studio. OK, let me give you a few tips, the SQL user is prefixed with the database name - [db]_[user] - eg sims.mattsmith - makes sense. Still can't get in, password wrong. OK, let me help again, the password is salted (or whatever you call it) by the application, there is a routine to do it - lets say I tell you what a particular password is salted or tell you how to salt your password using the routine. Bingo your in. But wait, you've got no access. Why, because the signature has all the access and you need to get it to execute your command. Suddenly your in a world of pain and Yoda's words are being starting to fade into the background - sod it, lets just create a normal SQL user account and limit their access to particular tables\views - problem, how does your non-SQL educated data manager \ headteacher \ whoever, validate you've not just slipped in access to something you shouldn't? Well they can't really - even if your SIMS support (just remember ratios are like 100:1 - schools to support staff) does go into SQL Management studio and confirm - how do they know you haven't just changed it from selecting from all tables? Or your going to change it after they hang up the phone? They can't, least using the official route of setting permissions you get a bit of auditing - even if lot of it is hidden away in the depths of the database. So yer, if you can figure out how Capita has setup signatures and use it then I tip my cap to you dear sir and ask you do share how you do it as I'd love to know, however I suspect the overhead of just using the API and doing data extracts, even using the reporting engine, would make it easier - even in terms of development . Bit of guff on why they've done it (don't even comment on if it was cloud based, it wouldn't be needed): from: Cryptography in SQL Server

That would drive me nuts, somethings clearly changed!

DirectAccess is awesome, however you know it'll back fire. You'll get a phone call at home late at night saying one of the old apps doesn't work, after hours of investigation you'll find it's because it doesn't like the IPv6 tunnelling.

It's one of the infrastructure setup files that SOLUS2 doesn't update, the old one doesn't change the path from the root of c:, so you have to do it manually. I'm guessing this is a new machine?

Doesn't SalamanderSoft have a similar product? - SalamanderSoft Limited - Free Utilities

Could be the secure method was funded as a LA school, but is chargable as an Academy and they haven't bought in. Could be they are understaff cause of all the cuts. Could be the secure systems isn't secure anymore and PSN has a very short deadline to fix it else you lose connectivity to alot of criticial systems. Could just be a misunderstanding - like they need to promote it now that lower years in primary schools all get free school meals but parents still need to apply so they can get the extra funding.

Be worth raising with @PhilNeal for a future change @bwfc_nottingham.

Your setups directory is out of date, ask for a clean setups directory or install SOLUS3. New installer puts the PDOXUSRS.net file in c:\programdata\fms as Win7 etc doesn't allow you to write to files in the root of drives, even with admin rights - is one of those new security features. The Capita KB (like above) refer to the days when SIMS was pre-MS-SQL and the database was stored in a flat-file on the database.

Didn't that disappear years and years and years ago? Wrote something which can be ran as a scheduled task: TidyBackups - Home Info on the switches: TidyBackups - Documentation, key one is the /preserve, so it you set /preserve=1 you'll always have at least 1 backup of each database even if it is ancient!

No, when you browse using the solus deployment console you use YOUR current Windows authentication not some super backdoor user. Capita don't have a login unless you give them one. They don't have a "backdoor". If they do, it's something you've given them.