matt40k

Just make sure you build it for the right reasons - if you're doing it for kicks off your own back, fair enough. If it's to save money, just remember you can buy SIMS .net for the same cost of around 5 days effort (assuming your in education and paid peanuts).

Think alot of people have spoken about it, not sure how far anyone has got - beyond ScholarPack which has become a very successful commercial product. What's this for? I know Arbor offer a free startup service for opening schools, there are a number of open-source projects however they are aimed at other countries - @bringmoredata blogged about a few - Bring more data: You want a free School Information System? Try SchoolTool.

Considering most of Capita business logic is client side, ie their intellectual property, I doubt they would want it posted on a public forum for anyone to download. You might have a better chance if you say SupportNet. Still unlikely to happen however.

Personally, I want people to suffer. Sorry, but I do. So when the really picky people who struggle with these changes and moan as if the world is ending see a UAT session come up, they're going to jump at the chance and their feedback is going to be fed directly to the developers and be developed into the first release. Now poor Chris Sherwood is going to have to go into a meeting about developer resource with his beating stick and battle to try and get it done - I'll be suprised if he gets it done within 6 months, rather then a week when he was swimming in dev resource (and no user feedback). God this is a sucky post. Sorry can't post a miracle workaround.

Not that I'm saying you've left feedback for a "new" feature too late, but... it's been live in your system for 4 years!! FOUR YEARS!! Clearly Capita need to force people.

I take it Microsoft haven't popped over to Bromcom HQ lately. Every other sales pitch is about Apps - lately it's how they've now done something or other so you can code your app in C# and run it on Windows Desktop, Windows Phone, Windows Tables, Android and IOS. Not sure what the real cost of Win8 is, you buy a new PC, it has Windows 8. It's like death and taxes, one day it'll get you. I think Facebook has an app, actually it's pretty tightly intergrated along with Twitter in Win8 and Mac OS. I know Business Objects has a HTML5 client and a "Rich" client - ie a Windows applications - and I find myself using the "rich" client as it annoys me less.

Really? You've not seen the Mac App Store? - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/genre/mac/id39?mt=12 Or the Windows Store - Getting apps for your PC - Windows tutorial Also worth a read: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 & went native for its mobile apps | VentureBeat | Dev | by J. O'Dell As for 50-fold efficiency, if they moved to a web service and moved the business logic to the server side, you'd get that saving. The client\app side would just be UI. The issue Capita are going to face is the price tag. If they stick with the current model, they're going to be charging bucket loads on licensing costs so the hardware\licensing savings isn't going to make it worthwhile. Going by the fact they're charging about £500 setup cost, I assume they are doing it manual (stupid), they're not likely to introduce a new low cost web service license model.

I kinda agree, I think axing the client and going totally web based is pretty foolish. Look at your smartphone, why do you have apps when you can access things via the web browser? Apps are superior, they offer a richer user experience. Also getting rid of MS Office, really? I just bought Office 2013 ProPlus for £8.95, it's peanuts nuts, before that I used OpenOffice and I had issues with other peoples ODF because they used a really old version or some odd port - we ended up saying save as MS Word doc most the time! MS Office is the no1 office suite for a reason. With all that said, the sims .net client is overkill for 80-90% of your users. That's why I think Capita's forthcoming Teacher App will be a killer, assuming the price is right and they keep it simple (ie no SLG). I think the problem will be - based on current 3rd party products, the cost will be too high. ps: don't forget cam moaning about finding a browser that everything works in, just cause it's web\cloud based doesn't mean it isn't "client" specific.

I think what @Gary_Ramsay is trying to say @localzuk is some school see the SIMS licensing cost as the final cost. It isn't. It doesn't run on air for starters and it doesn't do all the work for you. How many times have we see people moaning about needing to get new Office licenses? Or buying a SQL standard license because they didn't realise they'll need it. What Capita have done is capped the max cost. In-house vs outsourcing will always be a fight - even with the move to the cloud - it'll be employing someone to manage the cloud for you vs a 3rd party.

I think I'm going to slap you with a mobile device at BETT at this rate! Sensitive data on Dropbox, why not just put it on pastebin and be done with it lol. Dropbox aside, what happens if the schedule doesn't work? If the tablet battery is flat. If a million and one things. Not quite sure how class lists are out-of-date? If your policy is to print a new one each time a new student starts, that's what 4 pages each time? Not really a waste of paper in the grand scheme of things. Remember, it would be insulting to your attendance officer if you assume because they were absent in the AM that they didn't arrive later. Roll call should be who's physically infront of you, if you've ever been apart of it, you'll be aware of these late arrivals that the "up2date" list would have missed off. It's also important to remember missing doesn't mean still in building, it could mean they are just bunking off at the local McD - which is why the fire crew will ignore any lists you give them of missing pupils (to a certain extent - its always nice to have a target no rather then between 0 - 1,000).

Heck that's bad luck, unfortunately bad luck tends to go together - but I didn't say I was against class lists!! That's my fail safe! NO! Fire alarm = Exit building. It doesn't mean look around for a fire to assess how far away you are then head back to your desk, print the registers, then head to the printer, THEN exit the build. The point of a fire alarm is to tell you that you have a fire and you need to get it, it's not a question of distance. If you want to print the latest up-2-date registers when you do a fire drill and turn it into a joint truancy exercise, by all means. You can print all the registers in advance. I know mine and prob @creese beef is school go into silly mode and buy thousands of pounds worth of wifi equipment to get the playground connected up and on mobile devices all for "safely", only for it to fail because of something silly like the power got shut off, or strangely the device failed - have you ever tried supporting a device on the playing field with no tools? Your options are almost as limited as your time. If you've ever worked in a large school you'll know devices fail day-2-day. Don't risk them failing on the worse day ever. If you're lucky enough to have a system in place, great, use it by all means, just don't forget to take those print class lists, the attendance absentee report and the visitor book - just in case.

LOL @GREED!! So when are you announcing your fire drill app? Fact. The fire service will search the buildings regardless. Like @StevieM has said, this is getting into more of a safeguarding problem more then anything. Forget the fire scenario for a min, how do you know where little Jimmy is day-to-day, in a primary, they tend to stick in one class - easy, in secondary, they tend to move around, most schools would use Lesson Monitor like @creese spoke about, so you record attendance at each lesson rather then just AM/PM. As a parent I would remove my child if the school policy is: - to force a person to wait by a highly flammable printer whilst the "latest" register is printed - rely on technology - connections drop out, batteries go flat, electronic devices fail, software crashes. actually, heck, I'll remove my son if no-one in school knew who he was or didn't notice his lack of presence! Printing a class list then having the headteacher \ head of year \ SLT with a copy of all them which they can grab on the way out IS THE BEST ANSWER. Having the current class teacher responsible for getting THEIR current class out safely should be their responsibility, they should then report anyone who wasn't in the classroom - ie going to the toilet to SLT or such. This will need to happen even with a superfluous electronic system, even with ID cards! Interestedly, no one has questioned what happens if your school did burn down, and you lost your IT (sorry, IT equipment + fire = melted mess). How would you contact the parents of the child caught in the fire? Did you print the latest contact details on the register? Suddenly that annoying B2B task your LA keeps getting you to reset seems quite worthwhile.

Yes. You register the domain, then you set the nameservers - which tells the world where to look for your domain dns servers. Domain services and DNS settings are separate, it's generally a good idea to keep them separate. If you don't renew your domain, the register (Nominet for .UK) lock nameserver changes - you'll find some crooked companies will then use this lock to point your site at their holding service whilst they assess if it's worth them paying the renewal. Also domain registration is more a paper exercise, you don't need to host anything. DNS on the other hand is critical. You can sometimes get some good deals if you separate them out.

... Or we could gossip behind the bike sheds if you like

Exactly My point. "The only bit you care about is the bottom line - cost and the quality of the service" As for Capita, I think it's the right move. Primary schools are going to be happy, which is a large part of their business, they can keep the same quality product but remove the admin cost of maintaining it, including backups! I personally reckon this will really hit home next year when they do phase 2 and aim it at secondaries - then if we see the min entry drop to 2 or 3 then we'll see more uptake from primaries. Phase 2 will be when they release the teacher app - so those 100 users you have will drop to 80-90 teacher app users and 10-20 power users using the fat-client version - so that £990 per year plus £429 set up looks pretty good. This is all ofcourse dependant on the pricing of the teacher app.

My understand of the GovStore definition is SaaS = you buy services, not infrastructure. IE you pay your money (per user for example), they give you a service. You don't care if it needs 10TB of RAM or 1MB of RAM. The only bit you care about is the bottom line - cost and the quality of the service.

Do you use FMS?

Note: he didn't say which Monday

I think for @cdunn93 case, the advise would be for teachers to have a current class list and the keep it simple. You must have something already in place and the question would be why are you changing it? Is the change being pushed by technology or process? I personally think your looking at changing something that is prob fine as it is and doesn't need to change. @GREED - I think we're going off topic, we're having the real-time debate again like with parental reporting!

No server required.

Not sure how standing next to highly flammable toner in a fire would make me feel good!! @GREED - the advise is not to overthink it and go out and spend £££ on a solution that isn't really needed. It's great if you can access your MIS over 3G on your phone, but don't rely on it, signals drop out and I've yet to see a solution that is 100% proof. Best advise is to print form registers (termly) then have the kids line up by form group and the form tutor accounts for their tutor group. You then have reception with the sign in\out book and the attendance officer has the printed the absence list (as they normally handwrite notes as they work through it). Any technical solution will have it's problems - thats why most of us are employeed and why this site exists!! Problems happen and it normally happens at the worse possible time. The key is to keep it simple - and like @creese and @PhilNeal have said, the fire crew will ignore anything you say so its more a question of giving teachers lists to tick off for their own peace of mine more then anything.

Most I know about have a web api - you can just plug straight into SSIS. The web component in SSIS is pretty cruddy, so you'll be better off with the scripting component. Its far superior to the SIMS reporting engine \ CommandReport.exe

Install express using Capita's custom installer, then put the sql 2012 standard disc in, then upgrade edition.

You've just described why I like ad-hoc reporting over end-user reporting with "pixel perfect" reports - ie you spend all day making it look like the old report. I vaguely remember sivadam posting something detailing how to change the settings so it matches Nova-T4 report. No idea where that is however.

I think you'll spend longer trying to get it to work vs using the new version. In fact I think you've spend longer posting the question vs actually clicking Reports | Timetables (then select submenu item if I remember)