bobsmith

How does BromCom get around it, they use powerBI extensively AFAIK?

Are you working in a particularly affluent area? Will it be a requirement that every student has a privately funded school laptop? I would have thought that the ownership would dictate the policy here. If it's the schools then the control rests with the school, but if i buy a laptop then it's mine and i can do precisely what i want with it. A real world example from my experience - one of the most deprived london boroughs - during lockdown. We loaned about 400 laptops to students (out of 1400 students total) - those laptops were ours and we restricted them heavily. Impero was installed and they were monitored. The remaining kids had access to the internet via smart tvs, desktops, laptops etc which were family owned and we had nothing to do with them. Any restrictions put in place were at our end (e.g. google classroom/workspace policies) but this only affected students when making use of our systems for education. In terms of damages/attrition we have had issues with about 10 in 400 (still waiting for some to be returned!) so it's something to be aware of. As a final side note - you mentioned standardising on Teams - my experience talking to IT managers is that Teams is far less friendly in a school setting that google classroom/meet. Any insight as to the decision to go the Microsoft route over Google in this instance?

I can't imagine SIMS + all the third party software you need to match any modern MIS comes out at the same cost. We've got nearly a dozen third party apps that plugin that Bromcom does in-house. Seeing the costings we pay for all our bits and pieces I can't see how Bromcom/arbor anything else can cost anywhere near as much. However I'd love to see some *hypothetical* costings if anyone has any?

The teacher app was great until they dropped android support. The total cost of ownership of Teacher app now runs to the not particularly cheap licence fee to Capita + 120 ipads (if you don't already have them!) We're already running loads of third party apps to fill in the gaps - but the sooner I can migrate us to something like Bromcomm the better...

Still loving Salamander - it's saved so many man hours and transformed the work flow here. nobody has to chase poor old IT support - all user accounts created and provisioned from SIMS. Being scripted it can do pretty much anything you ask them to do. Had zero problems that weren't caused by us so far.

School Cloud gets another vote here. We've done two big parents evenings in the last two weeks and it's made the whole thing so ridiculously easy. Only blip was that we ran the first evening off site - so staff did it from their homes without issue - whereas the second evening was run (mostly) from onsite and we forgot to check the firewall - cost us the first 10 minutes of appointments while unblocking it. Zoom doesn't handle the scheduling or MIS integration does it?

Sort of - you can do it via Discover - this will create a "Discover group" which can be used the same way.

Sorry - was coming from a Data Manager's point of view - and I have to ask those questions - IT simply isn't the solution to every problem. Sometimes it's the process that's the solution instead.

Dad should not be contacted, - where did this directive come from? If it's not a court order then it's invalid. If dad doesn't want to be contacted then delete his phone number. I never rely on staff reading notes added to the record - if someone does miss the notices it's probably not gonna cover you when a complaint is made.

Salamander does this for us.

what course does that code apply to in real life? never seen that one....

idstore is running on our sims third party app server (something i've done simply to create a firebreak between the sims server and the stuff that talks to it) there's a sync to parentpay that happens via the cloud but that's about it - everything else is running locally. No server in the kitchen at all.

We finally got Salamander in last month and it does the whole SIMS to AD bit - then GCDS does the AD to GSuite bit - Salamander then does some more stuff like setting up groups from MIS to GSuite. It's a game changer if you really don't want to manually manage all those users and groups. It's not free but it's dirt cheap for what it does. Work out the man hours that you spend doing these things each year and I bet Salamander is significantly cheaper.

SBS - https://www.schoolbusinessservices.co.uk/mis-support/ A lot cheaper than what we paid Capita and they've got us out of a tight spot once or twice. Remember you still get access to the capita forums as long as you have a licence.

no problem at all - when you are doing the matching page you can de-select any kids you've already imported,

try changing the term from summer to spring or autumn yes it's a stupid suggestion but it's worked for me as SIMS has a mind of it's own when assigning reports to terms....

data collection report is built in to the sims parent app - isn't it also available in the parent app lite that they do for free? Also pretty sure only individual reports are available for sending out. Might be wrong - don't use intouch - just the app.

the making them all change their passwords is the fun bit. The password change needs to be made on your domain which precludes doing it during any kind of lockdown of course.... I've been busy every day of this adventure resetting their passwords in AD and emailing those that never did it the first time (18months ago) when we asked them to!

it's been a while since i was on an RM network but isn't RMStaff simply a staff shared area?

yep - but it works as a brute force way of doing it. Since SLT are sticking with letting some kids in and not others I'll probably be relying heavily on this script to do the heavy lifting

script tested and works fine - doesn't like being run on an RDP session on a server but on the desktop it's fine. Sub Send_email_fromexcel()Dim edress As StringDim subj As StringDim message As StringDim filename As StringDim outlookapp As ObjectDim outlookmailitem As ObjectDim myAttachments As ObjectDim path As StringDim lastrow As IntegerDim attachment As StringDim x As Integer x = 2Do While Sheet1.Cells(x, 1) (the symbol for not equal to) "" Set outlookapp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application") Set outlookmailitem = outlookapp.createitem(0) Set myAttachments = outlookmailitem.Attachments path = [b]"C:\Users\Barb\Documents\statements"[/b] edress = Sheet1.Cells(x, 1) subj = Sheet1.Cells(x, 2) filename = Sheet1.Cells(x, 3) attachment = path + filename outlookmailitem.To = edress outlookmailitem.cc = "" outlookmailitem.bcc = "" outlookmailitem.Subject = subj outlookmailitem.body = [b]"Please find your statement attached" & vbCrLf & "Best Regards"[/b] myAttachments.Add (attachment) outlookmailitem.display outlookmailitem.send lastrow = lastrow + 1 edress = "" x = x + 1LoopSet outlookapp = NothingSet outlookmailitem = NothingEnd Sub If anyone can get the forum to stop stripping the formatting please let me know how!

obviously not a fix for this particular case - but I've used candidate number or admission number for all student email addresses in each school I've worked at. Neither number has any meaning outside of the school - they are only unique within the bounds of the school. Staff have actual names and recently we added title "Mr, Mrs, Dr etc" so it's bloody hard to mix the staff and kids up - and two john smiths would have completely different email addresses anyway. Display name is still the students's name so you can check you've got the right kid.

Are you the IT guy or do you have IT guys? It sounds like an IT guy problem in the first place - our RDP server hasn't stopped us doing anything in SIMS so far. Shout at them to take a look - could just be a configuration issue with the version of office they've installed on the server - or a permissions issue.

looked at teams but the pricing just put us off - 3CX is our preferred option at the moment. 90% of the staff would be happy with a softphone (i.e. their own device using an app) so that keeps the costs down a lot.

Best of luck - I've never even considered it. Can you even store then play an audio file through SIMS?