Paul_Featherstone

Hi @minimoo, not aware of any new issues through the service desk or the Capita MyAccount forums at this time. Suggest a call is placed to your SIMS Support Team and encourage it to be investigated and escalated.

@minimoo - Thanks for posting the latest patch number, you beat me to it! Patch 22587 was withdrawn as it was not backward compatible with some versions of Office. 22599 is the current patch. In respect to a Hot Topic on MyAccount, this has been discussed internally a number of times and we continue to review this idea on a periodical basis.

Our escalation team have made some changes to patch 22479 and a new patch 22587 has replaced it.

To address this issue, patch 22479 can be applied to your SIMS system if it has been upgraded to the Autumn 2016 release of the software. 21751 was a version of the same patch but for an earlier version of SIMS. The root cause to this issue has been addressed and will be fixed in the Spring 2017 release of the software.

Hmm.... Appreciate I may have got the wrong end of the stick in your question, upon re-reading it I realise you are asking about the media for setting up a new site, sorry. This is available upon request from distribution for support teams or direct schools. The resource ID mentioned above should be available to Support Teams and Single Site Schools (i.e. directly licensed with Capita). If you are a school who take their licence from a Local Authority or Similar Support team, then this new item will not be available to you, but to your support team.

When a release is made, we always place a news item on Support .net, this news item will include links to the ISO images for the software and relevant documentation. For Autumn 2, the news item ID is 23639, to locate this, log into Support .net, click on the Capita News button on the right hand side and then search for resource number 23639. Hope this helps.

The new customer portal, from what I have been involved with in testing, should be an easier and better place for locating documentation and resources. We have to be very careful in posting documents all over the place, ideally we want to have one point of resource, that way maintaining and managing all the resources should be easier. There are plenty of technical documents ranging from SOLUS3 installing and configuration to managing the CTF matching screen all available from the SIMS Documentation Centre under the ‘Technical’ role. As mentioned before, we are going to review in the next release of the SIMS Installation Guidance note some advice on which applications use the S Drive as default to enable Network Managers to make decisions on how to manage their network resources.

Thanks @TheScarfedOne for your size 10 contribution, you are right and have understood the intention of Phil’s post completely. As a software supplier we have to do our best to make recommendations on how to install our software, this is covered to a large degree in the installation documentation available on the appropriate CD, but it could do with improvement around the area I discussed earlier. Our advice is to ensure that a school wanting to virtualise their environment should make sure they employ an expert as it is not just about setting up an environment, within your structure, but also the maintenance of the environment, what we do know is that SIMS work very well in a well managed virtual environment. I believe we can make our minimum recommended specification document better, there are ideas in tailoring this for different sized schools and for the products they use, but again, this can only be a best guess as every school will have different requirements, you never know, this may go some way to help address issues people may have currently. FYI - Documentation have just found resource 19548 on Support .net, a White Paper by Jon Wood regarding considerations when virtualising your network environments.

After reading through the forum thread, we have reviewed our documentation available as part of the SIMS Installation CD’s and are happy with the information and guidance provided. One area we have identified that could do with some further explanation is around the discussion of the use of the S Drive, how the SIMS .net application uses the S Drive and which applications and areas of functionality use this. It is something the Product Managers are going to look into and work with the technical documentation team to improve on in the next release of the SIMS Installation CD. Paul Featherstone SIMS Product Manager (Core and Releases)

Both Nick Finnemore and Phil are out today, but I thought it best to clarify the situation in their absence. We have not withdrawn the SIMS Autumn 1 release. Any school that has applied the release and is not affected by the issues listed on SupportNet should not need to apply the Autumn 2 release. However, schools supported by our Chelmsford support service desk will see that the release has been de-authorised (we incorrectly used the word ‘withdrawn’ in an email on the subject, which is what has caused the confusion in this forum). This is because our Chelmsford desk felt a number of the schools they supported would be affected by the issues listed. They believed, therefore, that the best option was to issue the re-release rather than individual patches. Other individual support units may have also taken the same decision and this would affect individual schools’ access to the Autumn release. I appreciate our communication could have been somewhat clearer on this matter and we will work hard on getting that right in future. Full details of known issues, patches and the progress on the re-issue (expected Friday) are available via SupportNet. Paul Featherstone Product Manager (Core and Releases) Capita SIMS