matt40k

I doubt that. Capita wouldn't be in business next year if they gave the training databases to schools.

I wrote a little blog post about what edition to use: Should I purchase Full SQL or is Express enough? – Matt Smith

Educated guess, posting it to the Head at your school, verifies your 1/ a school and 2/ the boss is aware. Other guess would be security, email isn't secure.

Could be worse, could be Flash!

snippets of code

First up, far as the SIMS API is concerned, it isn't exactly easy. It was designed for a sole purpose of producing the SIMS .net client. So it's not very developer friendly as it could be, in most cases you'll need to open SIMS .net to see how it operates and then you might understand the logic. You do get instances, like Dinner Money, where it's been "bolted on" so the logic isn't the same style as other areas which can add complexity to the matter. It does means you need to find a developer who knows both SIMS .net and C# or train up a developer in using SIMS .net. Unfortunately this does means they will be commanding a higher salary. Far as documentation goes, well clearly it's good enough because well, I've used it and made something useful from it: SIMS Bulk Import - Home. And I'm not the only one: Our partners | capita-sims.co.uk As for extracting the blood from the stone as it were, I've said my peace before about schools either funding it on the dream of it becoming the next SIMS .net and making millions or just not being realistic. From a support point of view @PhilNeal has said they're not geared for providing developer support - third parties pay through the nose for proper support. Support Units aren't geared for development support either. So I support them being putting barriers up to prevent costly mistakes happening. I think if I was going to go down the custom development route (from a schools perspective), I wouldn't start with a off-the-shelf MIS like SIMS. Something like Arbor has a much stronger API and would be much better - Index | Arbor Education. I accept there are still things that could be improve, I've discussed before about away to bulk import a entire person (staff) into SIMS, but I can't really offer the full service wrap to make it worth while - like a end-to-end online admissions service. Umm... So is that why they developed the reporting engine eh? It's not in Capita interest to give school complex underlying developer details when they already have a partner offering every possible solution you'd ever want.

Silly question, why a Mac?

~ Waits for @Schoolcomms, the forum sponsor to appear ~ Could I ask why your replacing it? Just asking out of interest - especially when it seem to be quite popular a few days ago - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/137744-slg-access-denied-any-other-advice.html - did something happen yesterday? Should I post some sunblock

Very aware I've not had enough time to really develop SIMS Bulk Import lately, version 2 still isn't in a state I'm happy with, but to give you a sneak peak I've released an updated preview. I've also done a minor maintenance release for 1.7.23, nothing new for existing users, just a fix to resolve problems if you have a funky connect.ini setup, as well as a bit of rebranding. I've not fully tested either, but hopefully a mailbox full of problems will re-motivate me. 1.7.23 (STABLE): [[REMOVED]] 2.0.1 (DEV) : [[REMOVED]]

You have to remember SLG is a web part\App for SharePoint and SharePoint is more of a framework and neither are a out-of-the-box solutions. Saying SharePoint is clunky and not very user friendly is untrue. If you look at successful SharePoint setups you'll notice they don't look anything like the out-of-the-box SharePoint setup. It's not that they haven't heavy customized it, it's that they've planned it correctly and set all the options correctly. SharePoint is very flexible, almost to a fault. With that said, would I use SharePoint in a school. Prob not, why, well unless your going commit to it, it's worthless. And I don't mean throw money at Capita! The problem is it's a framework, if you think about it in terms of PHP, you can get a PHP developer, but if your using a framework like Zend\Laravel, you'll be counter productive if your PHP developer is not following the framework rules, so you need to get a web designer who knows SharePoint. SLG certainly isn't set and forget which I suspect most people were expecting.

Personally, students I would use salamandersoft to auto generate student user accounts, staff I would have a word with someone like the Head's PA about how the recruitment process happens and just point out that IT needs to be in the loop early on if they hope to make that shiny new teacher useful from day one.

Installing isn't the problem, it never is. It's the supporting it.

Getting a bit mixed up their with Windows and SQL. Do have a point though - SQL2012 doesn't run on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, so all those using Windows XP\Windows Server 2003 are holding the rest of us back! Like I said before, I’m sorry, but SIMS8 can’t come fast enough – Matt Smith

No. Microsoft will not be supporting Windows Server 2003. They will be providing security patches for people who have thrown large sums of money at them (like the UK government has done for schools etc). Anything MS release, like .net or Office, won't work on XP\2003.

The current s3 encryption fekks any passwords with $ in, i.e. sims database passwords, so connection will fail. Weird no-one spotted it sooner, could of sworn Capita used $im5Rulz as the default SA password

It is actually that simple, so long as that network cable is plugging into the bt businesshub your ordering... Surely if they are renting an office any fixed sockets you have you can unplug them from your switches and plug into a separate switch and get a separate internet connection. Here if the council uses the building, they put in a separate internet feed. More for security then anything else.

I think legally you'd need them to have a separate internet feed. I know a number of educational resources are licensed by your IP\broadband connection and Janet is only allowed for academic purposes which a number of RBCs piggy back off. So you could end up with no internet and legal action being thrown at you.

Yup, ok with Server 2012. I suspect it's the old redirect in the connect.ini problem again. I rewrote the code in v2 and I suspect I'm going to have to inject it into the v1.7 as I'm still not finished v2.

Well, we can still see the road. We've not ran so far off that it's now a dot in the distance. Plus we need to do something whilst we wait for @pcstru to come back to us Just popping back onto the road for a minute... Remember this is done with in-house staff, if you look at the DfE spend lately they've been sending their staff on Microsoft SQL training. So cost wise it's pretty cheap. Cost savings wise, cost of training + labour of automating vs cost of doing it manual, you'll be recovering after the 2nd or 3rd time its done, also it'll be accurate - the hardest part is spec'ing and I'm assuming its already done (and to a high standard) as its already happening. This isn't going to be a big project that involves getting in some 3rd party to add-in some big name product, its in-house, ongoing development. Why? No extra data. No extra work for schools. Using public sector staff. Follows the one roof ideals of gov.uk that's being pushed already. This isn't ContactPoint, it might end up becoming what ContactPoint would have been, but that would be years and years and years AND years off! The main problem I saw with contactpoint was it was putting it in one place then opening it up to pretty much anyone. This is just putting it in one place (what already exists), then letting the same people access it. So rather then everyone created a data sharing agreement, you could use a template one - authorization could be like how you authorise apps on facebook (obviously not the same), ie facebook holds the data, the third party requests certain fields and you approve it. Data would still be "owned" in the same way as it is now. Surely being more proactive would only improve the data? Surely automating would improve the quality, remove the human errors (at least from the data mangling point of view anyway) Going back off the road, @CAM Thinking about 40k thing, assuming it's a 4x4 board, it'll be something like 50:50 of getting first time (assuming it's a coin toss), then 3x dice for the heavy bolter, 50:50 of hitting, plus re-rolls as it's twin linked, then what 50:50 again for damaging, then another 2 for the lascannons, again 50:50 for hitting with re-rolls, but pretty much a sure thing on damaging, then next turn your prob move so it'll be 6:1 on hitting you, assuming that rule still applies.... yer, would LOVE to see a solution that works that out, mainly so I could just say it was wrong and get them to explain how its right lol!

It only counts if you do analysis on that data, like the probability of my Land Raider destroying your jet bike squadron

Ah you got my point @CAM, well done, have some points - completely worthless of course, but have them anyway. My point was, data is siloed, if a organisation like Learning Records Service (LRS) needs data, it starts from scratch, it doesn't reuse data (or as well as it could). I just pointed out that reducing the extractions to all these places, we're not talking about adding more data to be extracted I might add, to 1 single extract, you could build upon that system to improve how data is returned. I admit it might not be a massive saving, but a few seconds every time you do it across thousands of schools and you start to see a benefit for very little effort of tacking something on. Please do @CAM, we need more material that can be referenced. It's hard to build business cases for things when the information is dotted across a forum like EduGeek where we go off topic... ooo something shinny... not saying forums are a bad thing, debate is good, but we still need articles to be build from the discussions.

@Barcrest How do you request the ULN?

Me, sell Microsoft products, I'm sure I don't know what you mean! In other news, how nice is that new Surface Pro? Blog is new, website is old (by web standards anyway).

New - what, two days.