bobsmith

eportal has an admin page which should have recorded logins - ditto the SQL database has comprehensive logging.

Pretty sure I couldn't find anyway of extracting the organisation information from a report

http://localhost:50000 will only work from the machine it's installed on - probably your SIMS server.

I've seen people go both ways - Personally for a typical school I think a SAN is overkill - especially if you're considering dumping more stuff on the cloud. There's a lot of performance improvements I've heard about when people have gone for nice fast RAID arrays using SSDs in their virtual hosts. You can get the price right down by getting refurbs from somewhere like ICT Direct - we bought 2 of their HPs not that long ago to replace 3 ageing Dells and not had any complaints about them. When I worked out the economics of it, if you replace based on age of manufacture rather than date of purchase, then buying refurbs and replacing them at the end of their warranty (typically 3 years) it's still cheaper than buying new.

especially fun when you have a mixed environment of 32bit and 64bit windows

They self identified as Aliens. There was a debate as to what shade of grey they are....

The amount of our users thrown by the change from blue to white icons!!!! Also they've made the tool bar icons non-ethnic and non-binary gendered. I really don't have issues on either of those topics but I don't know who made that a priority at Capita! Maybe they are just supposed to be little grey space aliens now?

not really a technical question so much as an education/statistics one - still let's have a go shall we? my way - make some kind of rough correlation between the scaled scores and the old ks2 fine points scores - then simply hijack the a8 estimates that use the ks2 fine point scores. make sure to put big stickers on everything saying "take with a pinch of salt". I think FFT just came out with their own estimates - didn't look into their methodology yet - but it will be another variation of guessing.

don't think so, commandreporter.exe runs reports - but not the built in ones. however I wouldn't want to automate this anyway - cover is done by someone and that someone should just press the export when they are happy that it's ready for public consumption - you don't want it being published as they are halfway through working on it.

I didn't think options online had anything to do with NovaT6 at all. I just created a year 8 into 9 plan to test this for you and it's working fine - we've not done anything outside the options-online interface. no promotions for the next year set up yet either. The common issue is not realising that you need to set the target membership date to sometime in the next academic year then pick the year group they'll be in at that point in time. when you go to the select students page it'll show you the year they are in CURRENTLY - so i picked 3/9/2020 and a target group of year 9 - then on the next page it showed me the current year 8s.

do you really need the templates? would it be easier to delete them and start again? Deleting templates doesn't delete the data.

We just got switched to Cunninghams as our catering is provided by the LEA - it's been a nightmare for the first month or two but has slowly settled down. Some of us were quite vocal in our opposition - we moved from NRS which was a bit flakey from time to time - but there's lot's of better reviewed alternatives.

You can make a really simple report to give you the name of the templates that the results are stored against. Just use focus "aspect" as the basis for your report and add a sub report of "templates" and it's straight forward from there.

SIMS just isn't good enough to do everything well - no piece of software can do everything and be the best at it. I've been shown the best that can be done with assessment in SIMS and it can do some fairly good stuff, but the game has changed and everyone has moved on - there's no way SIMS can compete with really good Excel or PowerBI. As for Child Protection recording - CPOMS/MyConcern are dedicated platforms with real security features and are designed from the ground up for the job - SIMS has nothing to compete with them - there's a reason why Capita push for their integration with MyConcern. Ultimately the future is (or should be) about integration - about using the best bits of the best products for the job - if the integration is good enough then you won't even notice that they aren't the same product or from the same vendor. As the network manager (guess you don't have a fully fledged data manager?) you certainly should be involved - advising on what products integrate most closely/easily and what products have functional overlaps with others. There could almost always be some rationalising of plug ins.

I used to do a lot of this with Facility CMIS where if you knew what you were doing you could get away with going straight to the SQL DB using a read only user and pull exactly what you want/need. Also the reporting tree was a bit more comprehensive... I've not seen the day/week mappings in the reporting tree for SIMS so guess you would be forced to go down the API route for this. Of course if you're just interested in getting the job done then salamander does this for a very reasonable amount of money.

if you're capable of installing sims yourself and using the database migration tools then it's just your time and effort. Our IT support company was upgrading all of our servers to server 2019 so that may have cost a few hundred quid and then our SIMS support company charged £600 for the database migration bit.

correct - I like to let everyone else find the bugs before I get the upgrade out of the way. We'll have to do it over xmas. So is this something they've broken in 7.190 or are we still thinking it's a local issue for the OP?

ours are all working fine. edit: version 7.188 here

CMIS is such an easy MIS to manage from the server side - migrating from 2008R2 to something modern should really not be a chore. If you were talking about SIMS however.....

there's a lot of other MIS's out there.

academic interventions are collected by us in our regular assessment mark sheets - this isn't sensitive and is easily reported on in an individual report as you've suggested.

when you refer to a history of everything that occured to a student would you be including behavioural/pastoral/CP and safeguarding issues? There's dedicated software that does this brilliantly and has the access control that you're looking for. Two examples are MyConcern (SIMS has a deal with them) or CPOMS.

does this actually have anything to do with SIMS? i.e. is any of the information in these documents pulled from regular assessments or attendance? If not would it not be easier all round to just have pro forma word docs that are stored in a shared area on your network with appropriate file/folder permissions? When you say slt and tutors - would that be ALL SLT and ALL Tutors having access to ALL student documents that you're creating - or specific SLT/Tutors per child?

I think you've outstripped a lot of us

if you can delete the inactive user then do so - you can probably get a patch to allow them to be deleted if you ask crapita nicely.