matt40k

One where I haven't seen a handwritten report for... umm... I think I was in primary school?? Not sure I've ever seen a letter sent home handwritten!! Yer, paper registers, got to love a paper register\markbooks in primary schools. Sloooowly dieing out now.

Odd.. Mainstream Microsoft support ends this month (08/07/2014) - Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search

I would love if one of your teachers started handwriting everything.

So you manually patching discover and waiting for the next major release for a simple little application fix? Nice. Suppose it keeps you busy S3 been in for over 2 years mate. Nicely bedded in. Nice to see ALL the machines are working and not just the server too. S2 on the other hand, well lets just say the helpdesk use to take the mick every time a release came out, or as they put it, Capita have released another digital signature plague then

Chicken and egg. Going by that logic, you'll never progress and as you'll never start as you'll always be waiting. Mmm... most primary are LA and they just do what the LA says, so they follow a standard, so once the LA has got something with their standard, it just works. Again and again. I guess it resource base, have Capita hired one person to visit each school

How big do you think your passwords are? Lol. You'll have a table already it'll just update it with the latest password hash. DBattach when restoring will sync with the MASTER database, it just doesn't do it when you backup. Some SIMS upgrades will trigger it to sync the master with the database, but not backing up. There is a CR for it, but... well, lets put it this way, with over 1,000 active CR logged this year alone and a workaround I doubt it'll get fixed anytime soon.

Yes. It copies the users from the MASTER database into the SIMS database, if you have FMS or other SIMS databases you'll need to run it against each database. Also you'll need to change the first SIMS if your database isn't called SIMS.

Don't. Let whoever is install SIMS, install SQL 2012 express, then put the disc in and upgrade edition to Standard.

Suppose the extension will give the other MIS suppliers time to catch up. Capita is stuck waiting 3 months to roll out an application fix\new feature for (almost) another 2 years!! Add the fact they can't setup contained databases (requires SQL2012 or higher) - this will allow them to store SIMS SQL logins within the database so you don't have to de-attach, re-attach the database and lose half the logins when you move servers - SQL Server 2012 Partially Contained Databases Part 1 - Contained Logins - SQL Server Premier Field Engineer Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs. I hope one of the other suppliers sent them a thank you gift.

It's a billion educoins for a pint. In true Edu form, if you were in the private sector your deeds would be worth about 30 pints vs the 1 you'll get.

You'll be a fool to use it for bitcoin mining. 1/ GPU are better then CPU, 2/ Litecoin would be better then Bitcoin and 3/ Bitcoin is a mugs currency - no gov backing it means it's only worth what another mug will pay. Whoever says its worth something is trying to sell you (indirectly) bitcoins. 4/ Be better off with EduCoins, least they buy you beer.

So what your telling me is you've already done all this and you've travelled back in time to buy the server for me Why thank you sir.

haha.... so the schedules goes like this... Week 1 - find a unknown planet Week 2 - Cure cancer Week 3 - find the meaning of life Week 4+ - find way to pay electric bill generated from weeks 1 - 3

If by look at it you mean borrow it, then maybe. Might even throw in the giraffe. I wonder how much credit I'd earn runnin Rosetta@home for a day on that thing? Rosetta@home

That' still in the original quote - 12,000 yen (JPY) right?

Mmm... we're having performance issues, I wonder if running it all in RAM would resolved those issues? Wait a min, no SSDs. For shame!

Ah... . Luckily the "one ring to rule them all" idea didn't work for us, god bless firewalls - did think about settings n many schools to a day of the week and get them into the habit of updates happening once a week on that set day. Then I moved teams

SIMS .net is peanuts for this sort to thing. Just have to be careful as the costs ramp up quickly (with all the bolt-ons and consultancy). Check with the LA tho, they might already provide something and it just hasn't been used.

I think the bug is with how SOLUS3 handles the SIMS release - I guess they didn't get it until the last moment - it's like when you write reports, you get issues cause the data is yucky and the data is yucky because the form validation is quite right but you don't know that the form validation isn't quite right until you write a report to look at the data... and the process can't start until someone enters the data into the system. Bit of chicken and egg. Guess it's time to start looking at auto deploy

Am I missing something? Sounds like they've resolved it before it was released then... ie they've found a bug whilst they tested it?!? The idea of agile is you build faster and more frequently, it will have more bugs, but they are smaller and they are resolved faster. Can you image how long it took to re-issue 22,000 CDs? Don't want to even think about when they used floppy discs!! The key issue is the timescale from you reporting an issue to it being resolved on your system, it doesn't matter if they do 1 patch or a 100. If that 1 patch takes 3 months to get applied on your system, you'll take those 100 patches that apply in 30secs any day. It looks like from this release on, see below, application fixes that normally require a re-release or you have to way 3-4 months for the next release can be issued like a database patch, but only via SOLUS3. Suddenly SOLUS3 looks a whole lot nicer.

Your prob right, but remember it only takes 1 and in Capita case with school count in the thousands, that's pretty bad odds to gamble with. Just think about if a child's "Uncle" learnt about the school being without it's MIS and went and collected the child.

The OP was directed at the new problems introducted with cloud - I think the wider problem exists today, ie the risk of running something with zero support. Keep the lights on whilst you rush to the exit should be the same for a cloud solution as it is self-hosted solution. I say should from the point of view of not all of the cloud solution use the same setup and some are better then others. To add a bit of context, I don't have any extra fears of SIMS8 over SIMS7 that the cloud assuming Phil does his two points (and ideally the third)*. Capita having an escrow agreement so we can get at the code, but we need that emergency planning group that Phil is taking about to takeover if god forbid that day ever comes. As far as how quickly you could migrate away over, I've heard alot of optimistic statements from varies companies, but the fact of the matter is I doubt you could do in any length of time your likely to get. Let's hope we never see the day that Capita SIMS goes under - I know alot of people wish it, but the thought of migrating 18,000 schools, SIMS8 or not, pretty much overnight is a scary thought - that's before even thinking about the re-training required or any of the million things you'd have to redo. * I do however have fears about central hosted, but that's another story.

Microsoft are matching Amazon prices so it shouldn't be too expensive to have a half and half setup - ie one half your "cluster" on Azure and the other on Amazon or whatever. @GREED - your forgetting, infrastructure costs are peanuts, staff costs are the issue and when the administrators come in they're chopped off straight any, so are any costs like office space rental. So I'm saying don't expect anything other then enough time to get a backup off! PS: I hope your not suggesting Phil should spend all of Capita money and cut off any income revenue - actually aren't they stopping cheque payments and moving to direct payments?! Did anyone check the bank account it's going into - sure it had a description of "Graham's retirement fund"

I was thinking physically printing it off and sticking it to the iPad I hope you guys didn't buy them solely for this task @speckytecky lol

I don't agree with your fire analogy, it's more like "get everyone out and the fire crew will try and get anyone left behind... [insert disclaimer]". I agree I wouldn't rely on goodwill either, but like I said, I would have a 3-way agreement with the MIS supplier and the cloud provider if it was me. Anyway I don't think I'll ever get you to agree. Clearly your happy (with self-hosted), and that's fine. I just don't think we should chop off options without good reason, it's like saying lets not record pupil data on computers because they might crash. You have to admit Capita as upped its game since more solid MIS suppliers have hit the market and that's good for schools and that good for everyone in the long run. It's good @PhilNeal has raised it as it needs to be thought about, even if their is no clear answer. In self-hosting terms its like, what if my server goes up? People will over complicate things but it basically boils down to doing backups and have processes in place to take over whilst the server gets rebuilt - like paper registers, printing the data collection sheets every term. What Phil has done is like when the analysts raised the point about Apple's future and the Apple only developers started to panic when they pointed out that if Apple didn't make enough money they would default on their tax return, despite having large cash reserves, most of their money is offshore to avoid being taxed, so they would have to pull the funds across and get heavily tax which would cause a minor debt into a big debt which ofcourse would cause the stock price to drop which could turn it into a major problem. Anyway, for a let's hopefully for everyone's sake we never have any school have to deal with a MIS supplier going under - cloud or otherwise - so we can keep this academic.