bobsmith

Are we talking SIMS? I learnt by exploring the reporting tree - it's got some really weird oddities - items stored where you wouldn't expect to find them.

I thought that bromcom actually stores the lesson data as shown in your classcharts example? i.e. Lesson 1: 9:00am - 9:49am Lesson 2: 9:50am - 10:39am

No bulk method in SIMS, but we have a trainee and she blasted through 80 odd in about an hour. Get someone to name the photos first (someone who recognises the staff is a good start :))

Lates worked fine for us using Inventry combined with Bromcom. Any odd discrepancies can always be overridden once you've written back - but 99% of students never required it.

google says schools typically start in September but it varies from school to school - just make sure that the first day of term is set correctly and then line up all the course membership dates with that. If your courses are starting in sims before the official start of term (kids physically attending) then your school calendar (in SIMS) needs amending!

Hi Sally, nope - import was working fine once we found an email with this years licence. The page here could do with mentioning this new licence method though - I can't see anything about the new method of obtaining licences. https://www.ess-sims.co.uk/partner-with-us/accredited-school-photographers

D.

where in the world are you based? In England you wouldn't have admission dates in August. Also - it's possible that the students were enrolled on one date and then had their start dates amended - it could certainly cause these issues as well.

if someone else has been assigning the students they may have left "restrict date from today" ticked. alternatively if you imported the groups via SLK files then the date when importing may have not been set from the first day of term.

Thanks Sally - but in the meantime Our Account Manager has contacted your Commercial Operations Administrator and it turns out that it does indeed look like the licence is now available as part of the "optimise" package rather than through the photographers. "We are delighted to share some exciting news with you regarding the products you’ve contracted with us. As part of your agreement, the Optimise package you have from 1 April 2025, means you are entitled to the functionality of Photo Import Batch Licence, which will enhance your experience and provide you with even more value, by allowing you to import a batch of pupil photographs into your SIMS database. This is a feature that you may have typically completed by purchasing the Photo Import License directly from ESS or via an Accredited SIMS Photographer."

Morning Gang Anyone had to batch import their new student photos this year? Our photographer is on the list of accredited photographers - but they are telling me that we have to contact parentpay to obtain a licence. However the parentpay website is still saying that sims accredited photographers provide the licence - to obtain one for use with a non accredited photography company costs £105 each year. Who is telling the truth?

also get your attendance officer to read the DfE rules on attendance - you can't demand evidence for every absence.

google ai had a really good set of instructions for bulk deactivating assessment templates in SIMS utilising the student bulk update tool. Only problem is it is just an AI hallucination and you can't do it. Anyway - as far as this topic - I would either create a user account (rather than a staff record) - or typically we would record them as a member of staff but tick "do not include in census". I'd capture emergency contact info as they were on site for weeks/months typically.

if it's got kids in it then it's not a NCC period (since NCC = Non-Contact Code) that said - you can timetable it easily enough - if you're only using underutilised teachers then after timetabling everything else - pull out the list of teachers who are free for each period and drop one on each unstaffed period for the re-focus room. Don't know if I'd let NOVA-T6 loose on it - you'd really want to lock every real teaching period before letting it attempt to automate it.

I had it all sketched out on a piece of paper that I sadly didn't take from my old job wehn I left. basically there's MIS (e.g. sims, bromcom, arbor) >> MIS SYNC >> IDSTORE >> Cunninghams << ParentPay << MIS so there's really two seperate systems (Cunninghams and ParentPay) which both talk to the MIS seperatly but also interact at the canteen level. In terms of letter generation for accounts - the parentpay help guide walks you through it well enough to get it done.

safeguarding concerns, SEN information, Exam* results - these are the things that you have a statutory obligation to keep (* exams are held by the exam board so technically you don't have to keep them) all the day to day crap only needs to be kept as long as you have a necessary reason for it. GDPR principle: The UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states that personal data should only be kept for as long as necessary for the intended purpose, meaning institutions must justify the length of their data retention periods So in this case - unless you can think of a pressing need - lose it.[/color]

but they don't wanna use bromcom to do the migration?

that's huge! Bromcom only gives you 10Gb of storage for documents! (you can pay for more) check your retention policy - but I'd bet that you can get rid of a LOT of that. In the short term - archive all the oldest files to a network share - simply removing them from the DMS in the process.

run "validate memberships"? If there's no orange bar then there's no membership - but it could need the kick up the bum from running that routine to remember this....

me being stupid perhaps - is that the total size including the transaction logs? - got a breakdown of mdf vs ldf?

but as usual - it's some users and not others - yesterday i was suffering from really slow access and timeouts - today I'm fine but others here are moaning at me. I've told 'em to log out and log back in again in the hope they pick up a different server

if this is part of the migration surely bromcom are doing this for you? Remember them doing it for us (possibly the last week was chargeable)....

I would not be in the least bit surprised. SIMS was written in the 80s ffs.

ks3? is this right?

I've read all the stories the BBC had around the 3 schools built by this company - I'm surprised your takeaway was that the LA is an issue. All 3 schools appear to be Academies and therefore publicly funded by privately managed institutions. Also looks like the academies were in charge when the buildings were going up. The DfE are funding the rebuilds - but the contractor who went into administration has already been bought up - but handily without the liabilities it had.......