bobsmith

still struggling with scaling I see.

First initial of forename, first 3 from surname. But if it does spell something rude then a bit of human judgement gets thrown in to the mix.

good news! Bromcom is very very flexible. 1. the staff id is not a unique key field so you can even change it and not break stuff! 2. I've got 7 letter codes for some staff including a space. e.g. SUP AFE (that's me) - the SUP is for support then a space then my initials. Teachers I've left with 4 digit codes external staff get EXT as a prefix TA's get TA as a prefix Invigilators get INV as a prefix. Trainee teachers get STU as a prefix Caused no problems with any of our partner systems so far (used this coding for 2 academic years now)

This is the way.

10,000 a month is less than 10 emails per student here - with the amount of random emails they love sending here we could require 4 times that!

importing from the spreadsheets seems the way to go as you've exceeded the power of sims marksheets. #1 RULE here - make sure you provide a unique id that will allow you to import the spreadsheet data into sims - you don't want to be matching by hand every time!

when bromcom has gone down recently it's been the webclient that teachers and admin staff use - but the teacher app runs off a different set of servers and so is often up when the main site is down. giving us access to the teacher app without relying on everyone having it installed on their phones would be a handy "if all else fails - break glass" option.

We are in the same situation as you - but went another route. Salamander runs the place now - it's basically SkyNet.... But since we don't actually like the idea of giving people - who are technically not employed yet - access to student and staff information we don't add them to bromcom until they start*. *well we create their records - but their contract and employment start date are in the future. They get a guest user account for the induction day/s and the teacher running the induction uses their account to show them around bromcom. They don't get let loose on it until DBS comes back clean and their contract starts. However the workaround when I need to get someone on before their contract start date is simply to give them an employment start date before their contract start date. then amend it after they actually start for real. Pretty sure our salamander install looks at employment not contracts (I know because HR aren't always quick to enter contracts!)

Look at posts by David Potts - he's got some great instructions (and courses) on how to use command reporter to export data that you can then link up to powerbi for analysis. Though we only ran the reports overnight as this was sufficient for "live data" - though if you really want to you could pull attendance during the day if you're prepared to take the performance hit. Since going to bromcom this isn't an issue as it has multiple methods for extracting live data natively.

yeah - which is why there's actually a missing results function built in to the marksheets area. It will check EVERY column - even hidden ones - so you may need to make a version of the marksheet template which only includes the columns you're looking to check.

yeah that's just not right. if it's your front office doing it then it's either lock them out of the behaviour section or have a quick refresher on how to add notes correctly - and when they are not needed!

what MIS do you currently have in place? That's a great starting point to see if you even need a bolt on.

it doesn't know they are missing if you're asking it for results and aspects. you'd only know they were missing but cross linking it to curriculum to see if they are studying a subject that there's no matched result for.

check their timeline of memberships - possible someone amended their start date but didn't update all their memberships - such as year group/ tutor group?

This is a screenshot of an old report of mine that might point you in the right direction: The points themselves are stored in "additional behaviour types" - afaik. Subreport on that and filter out those with points = 0 as @David44 suggested above.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/SIMSUserGroup https://www.facebook.com/groups/schooldatamanagement Both great groups to join for all your data manager needs if you're in your first month still!

At the very least if you're gonna operate an opt out system - have they at least been made aware and offered the opt-out clause?

What data are you sharing here? I'm confused as to what you need any permissions for here? The name of their teacher??

Salamander is dirt cheap for the work it does. As for avoiding duplication of existing records - it can totally do that - there's a bespoke element to what they provide where some business logic can be used to write rules to avoid this. I'd have salamander take over the job of your AD sync - there's just no reason to run both. https://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/products/integration-suite-for-schools/

yeah - your school day structure should allow this 5th period if it's a timetabled lesson. Sims activities is for clubs and trips - not adding a random period of y12 physics. However you could make it do that - but why pay extra for that module when you can just timetable the 5th period..... It's always good when your manager "seems to remember" some solution to a problem they created....

Salamander pulls the pictures too.

But your posted picture shows support from summer 2024 onwards - and in SIMS release chronology aren't we on it now?

Exactly this. After years of faffing around trying to get temporary databases made to link up to various id card printer systems we solved the whole issue with Salamander talking to paxton.

I second that - dual roll history was a royal pain in the ass - make a report in your current MIS and then manually enter them after you go live. Alternatively I think you can get around it by exporting CTFs including the "school history" and then reimporting them and set to import ONLY school history.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/ this should be your go to for rack design. the favourite is: patch switch-- patch patch switch-- patch As for our main cab - with the servers - we made the decision to ban copper from the room - so all the satellite cabs are linked with 10gb fibre back to the core switch - servers are also in that rack but all fibre too. It only involved moving the adjacent classrooms to their own cab outside of the core rack room and then running a fibre back. So much easier to work with.