bobsmith

Is the question bromcom specific or are you trying to come up with an assessment structure that fits from EYF to KS5?

I trained up an assistant head with zero timetabling experience to use Edval in a matter of weeks during his "free" periods. Funnily enough the most effort went into teaching him the basics of timetabling rather than using the software - that part is pretty intuitive and nothing like the learning curve of using Nova-T6. The closest he got to timetabling prior to this was rearranging an excel spreadsheet of the current timetable without formulae. He did start doing some official training on Nova and then swore he'd never timetable if he had to use it - I never blamed him. As for Edval - after we got a workable curriculum plan and staffing allocations figured out (no need for timetable software at that stage) - the algorithms they use actually produced a decent timetable in about 2hours.....

well it looks like it was something at parentpay's end as they replied that it "should be fixed now". No further explanation given.... It was indeed working again without any action by us.

then the follow up error is this:

Good morning all I was happily validating addresses for my new applicants yesterday but as of this morning myself (data manager) and another user are both getting an error when trying to use the address validation service. Anyone else had this and have a fix?

If SBS can't raise a case with ESS then can you still do it directly? You can go through your SIMS account manager if there is no one in school with credentials.

The IP issue that ParentPay has been chucking around when it comes to MIS migrations is primarily related to SQL Stored Procedures (that nobody is actually interested in....). An XML export is essentially a flat data file similar to a CSV or XLS (or even a notepad doc!) and even ParentPay would struggle to justify to themselves that this is a propriety format. We did an .SPL to .etz migration back in November and it wasn't raised back then.

Parentpay support are the only people that you should be getting direction from on this. When we did the migration and had to do the initial matching up exercise they provided excellent support on this process. Since this can affect balances and lead to unhappy parents it's worth putting the time in to get this right.

the MIS you use will have some influence on the system you use. what MIS are you currently running? we're currently SIMS with ipay - but I've used parentpay with both SIMS and Bromcom in the past and it works reasonably well.

I could swear we had a meeting about SIMS 8 back before 2010! Next Gen is actually a much more recent product - I think SIMs 8 was finally killed off in 2021 and NextGen was launched as it's replacement.

if you aren't in a MAT then you won't have access to vision (which has a much more comprehensive feed) - but you can pay for it - I never got to the point of getting a price though. I still think they need to make the datasets the same though - not everyone is in a bloody academy chain.

1. get a copy of the SQL database direct from ESS themselves* * if you're on prem that's super easy - if you are hosted by them then it used to be easy - until they lost so much market share that they got super reluctant to hand it over 2. use Wonde to export as much as it has access to 3. run reports to find all the data and export to excel then reimport - note that the reporting tree can't necessarily see everything in the database.....

I can't honestly remember when SIMS was the cheap option...

in which case it should just be a matter of switching developer mode on - doing the find and replace, switching developer mode OFF again.... then saving the report. when I was last using on-prem it worked beautifully for doing this.

a 12 year old necro post is quite impressive! that said - are you using sims hosted or you still have on-prem sims? Cos on hosted they've disabled the developer tab so there's no one of editing the tags directly. What used to be a 2 minute job updating reports now takes approximately forever and introduces a lot of checking as you're effectively rebuilding from scratch.

parentpay missync - has a cloud version - we used it with bromcom in my last place - we just told them we were changing to a cloud mis and they offered the switch over. myed - keeping kids safe - is that the communications program? - that was using a bespoke connector so we just dumped them and used the inbuilt comms package with the MIS TES room booking - totally has a cloud sync option - we used it with bromcom none of them use wonde or groupcall and there's a cost involved to them which I can't see them soaking up for just one school.

of course the actual data in the database is yours - so if you can extract the data into a standalone sql database i.e. a sql.bak file then you've got that at least - but they get very pissy over their proprietary database structure and stored procedures....

As the title says - anyone suddenly (or previously) noticed it just shutting the browser window mid session - I was literally looking at something else for 30 seconds and the window shut. This only started happening for me today - but other users have reported it's been happening for a few days. It's like they know we're leaving them and they are just messing with us now.... :(

if you're dumping sims then aren't you dumping schoolcomms too - since it's owned by the same people? if so you wouldn't need to hand over money for the migration.

I had to do a double check before getting myself all confused. So Schoolcomms was originally a third party system right? And ParentPay have bought them up. ParentPay also bought up SIMS - SIMS natively has intouch as their communication package which is fully integrated (as far as SIMS does integration....) Does schoolcomms still get it's data from a third party connector service like Wonde or Groupcall? Is the confusion that although they are all owned by the same parent company that this communication between them is not very good?

Hosted giving anyone else connection issues since yesterday - intermittently?

from other threads I've seen it seems they are rolling it out to schools on some internal timetable of their own. the tile that loaded sims connected has simply been replaced with one that loads next gen. Be prepared for the changeover without any notice!

if you can find it let me know - I waded through every page of tiles and couldn't spot it.

So we just got hit by the new interface move. phone call from random teacher - I can't get into SIMS - I'm justing seeing this new website! there's no option to remove that tile and put the old one back that I could find - so I've had to send out an illustrated guide on how to get back to regular old sims to the entire staff. cue our support team getting emails, phone calls and visits from confused staff for the next few days...... Does ParentPay (this weeks owners of SIMS) just really hate their customers? If you wanted a step by step manual on how to destroy a successful product just do what the succession of owners of SIMS have been pulling for the last 10-15 years. /rant over

Irrespective of MIS (we did this on Bromcom) - this method from BKGarry is the way to go. We had 10 accounts available - they had a random password set every night and a script to email the receptionist the usernames and passwords for the day. This also gave them temporary guest Wifi access as well as access to all other IT systems of relevance. IT Support didn't have to lift a finger after setting up the accounts and the scripts. Supply teachers/visitors don't have time in the day to hang around the IT office waiting for access or for someone to come down and reassure the techs that they are in fact authorised to get an account. Reception/Cover Manager/HR should be controlling the access as they know who they've hired.