bobsmith

Back when I first got the internet at home and we connected via a 14.4k modem and used TurnPike to connect, there was a real distinction between the WorldWideWeb and things that were seemingly a little bit different like BBS? Being just a kid back then I don't how much of a difference behind the scenes there was.

I'm guessing you've got SIMS InTouch as well? Cos I don't and I haven't got a "messages" screen. In bog standard SIMS if you go to "Student Teacher View" on a student record and then click on the blue arrow above their timetable there's an option to message all staff (of that student).

I've created a PA group in Discover, I'm guessing it works cos i get messages every time a student is added or removed from the group. The trick is to decide what your PA threshold is going to be (current DfE is 90% i think) and make sure that's available on the "Percentage Session Attendance Year to Date" graph. If the boundaries showing aren't what you need, you'll need to go into the Discover Administration utility and customise it. I then dragged my year groups onto the graph and then created a dynamic group by cherry picking the year 7 to 11 columns as I'm not including my 6th form in it. You can add supervisors to the group back in SIMS who will receive the messages about the students in the group.

You can map your data across to discover aspects and it works reasonably well, but I found it was just too much faffing around on the whole. It is pretty much always faster to pull it out and do pretty things with excel, particularly as it's far far far more customisable.

Do you have responsibility for the post 16 census info? How do you link these odd students to the courses/qans? I know I'm moving away from your original issue, just curious as this was a major headache for us too. I've taken a lot of the manual editing out of the equation but being religious about assigning students to the courses they really do, not just the classes they are in. More work at the start, but much less work and risk of it being missed later on when it matters.

We have a similar problem with odd kids needing edits for some reason or another. With students in a class doing a mix of double award and single, have you considered setting up separate aspects in the marksheet for recording the double grades separately to the singles? When you are doing data analysis of grades do you manually duplicate the single grade?

Right you are sir, just tried it myself, can't change the type to AM Individual Report either. So if you just want the document attached to the kids record then my method works, but if you want to do it properly then it's not so simple. back to the drawing board. Can the parent see other document types on SLG?

or fire the backup onto a spare server and find the results you're missing. you could import them or even manually enter them. no loss of data using this method.

download it, edit it, then manually upload it to the student's inked documents and delete the old one.

from my now slightly distant experience of deploying solus 3 for the first time, what each machine gets is a unique id assigned by solus, if the machine screws up and you rebuild it then solus will "forget" about it. Naming it the same won't reinstate the uid. You'll have to re-add it through the Solus - AD interface. Could be wrong though

Can't answer most of your points because I've only ever looked at the TASC website, it's something I REALLY want to try cos it looks 10x (maybe 100x) better than SLG. Who is responsible for creating reports - me, the data manager. Who else? (I do cheat and have an assistant who has the fun job of putting all the aspects in, but I've still got to check it all works). How do we do reporting in our school - SIMS all the way. Assessment Marksheets + individual reports for the standard report (3 or more times per year) then Comments are done through profiles for the wordy report once a year.

nope, that's not overlarge, I had a 25 page template which ran perfectly fine a couple of weeks back. can you generate a single student and time it for us?

If you want another huge time saver - when you do a replace on "resultset" why does the list contain ALL resultsets rather than those that are actually in use in that particular template?

what's your SQL server spec? what's your client pc spec? how many pages, how many tags, anything super complicated about your report.

I created new aspects anyway as we are dual reporting where appropriate. There's only about 25 subjects here so 25 aspects needed creating for grades, didn't take too long.

Our Network Manager runs proper SQL backups. The system manager route is only used when Capita want a backup they can use. I presume the major difference is the security on the file, the SQL backup still has the SQL user permissions attached, whereas the .bak from system manager doesn't?

Frequently had issues with third party applications requesting more access than they really need. It's often a case of them asking for the highest access rights to avoid having to specify precisely what they do need. Even more annoying is that after there was a discussion on this forum about the misuse of the UPN I've found a well known third party routinely using it for no good reason!

Whenever Capita want a backup from me to upload and trouble shoot a tech case this is the method they use. It's not a pure SQL backup, but I've never deconstructed one to see what the differences are.

Don't assign the program set to student user types?

It's up for me, been using it all morning.

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/167204-how-access-sims-offsite.html

your screen is the same as mine, where SIMS is concerned I'm pretty sure default means default.

Lesson Monitor being the SIMS (optional) built in register integrates perfectly with the rest of SIMS. TASC PARS offers far more than lesson monitor does (it builds upon and replaces vast tracts of things that SIMS does). Are you using the behaviour tracking and assessment functions that SIMS already provides? Are you looking to move that away to TASC as well? It's not a like for like comparison, registers appears to be one of the more basic functions of TASC PARS, it goes far beyond that.

set up discover groups, then membership will be updated automatically by discover. this works for anything that discover knows about, e.g. PP SEN etc.

Just to clarify, this sounds like you want to move your whole MIS away from SIMS, not just attendance?