bobsmith

@JohnCondon We switched when the ESS debacle broke - you actually did our sales meeting! - we had no need of the incentives as we timed it pretty much perfectly. Even though the honeymoon is over for me and I'm starting to chafe a little bit about my limitations with bromcom (dunno if it's them or me yet) I only need 5 minutes with a SIMS install to remind myself why almost any modern MIS is preferable. There's some bits of SIMS I get nostalgic for, but there's many more that I don't, because the new stuff allows me to automate ENTIRE jobs.

Last time I tried out the graphs in individual reports in SIMS they were bad. Like 1980s bad. My personal opinion is save your time and energy. That said, if you're a glutton for punishment, the built-in sims documentation explained how to do them. Search for keyword "inserting graph"

Huge Salamander fan here - literally nothing to complain about - actually the opposite - whenever we've had a brainwave about something else it *could* do they've managed to do it. All IT accounts managed by salamander make my IT team a happy bunch.

You can change MIS whenever you want - the ONLY issue at stake with the whole ESS fiasco is how much longer you pay for SIMS after you've dumped it in the bin. Arbor seem to be offering a solution which even invalidates that concern as they won't charge you while you're still paying for sims (or something to that effect). Does Bromcom offer a similar workaround to save paying for 2 MIS at the same time?

SIMS? if you've only got a few to check you can do a subreport for each UDG (filter each subreport) Bromcom? You're stuck in the same boat as me - I had to do a seperate report to output ALL the UDG memberships (List) and then transform it to a matrix so I could vlookup it into my original staff report.

Sorry for the super late reply - but that's perfect - wish that was in a guide somewhere! I'll have to make one now!

Sorry for the slow reply. Teachers can see their own marksheets no problem. HoDs want to see either ALL their departments marksheets individually - or more like in SIMS - they want a marksheet containing ALL students that take their subject in each year group - or if worst comes to worst - all kids in a year group with a class name in a seperate column so they can see who takes the subject and who doesn't. At the moment they have no access at all to anything other than their own classes.

So as much as I'm loving the move away from SIMS there's still basic stuff that I haven't figured out in Bromcom that I could do in SIMS. One thing I've got a lot of staff calling for is the departmental marksheets - so a head of year can see how complete the data is for chasing their departments or to review the data that has been entered before it's completed. I've tried adding the department as a marksheet - that didn't work - you can't even pick "subject" as a marksheet (it was "course" in SIMS). Anyone got any ideas?

double chocolate chip - and congrats - another year and you can drink!

I had KS3 Targets and KS4 targets and that works fine. If your model has different targets for each year of a student's career (e.g. flightpaths) then that isn't any good. Easiest way is to import them directly into a new resultset.

Sorry for the late reply - quite a busy time of year. I personally find the easiest way is to make a new marksheet template. On this template add all the subjects set to read only. create a marksheet for that template - base it off a year group rather than a teaching group and you've now got all the kids.

this one is thankfully easy. there's two basic files you need for sisra - a student report and a results broadsheet. SISRA have a .rpt definition file for sims on their help section. just download that and customise if you have any extra fields you use. the broadsheet is easiest done as a marksheet rather than a report. just make one with all the subject columns you need and make sure you export it with whatever unique ID you use in sisra for student matching. prepare both with using the sisra excel add-in - also available from their help section. The user id key you need to activate it can also be found in the help section - it's unique to each school. hope that helps.

I phone Bromcom on average 5 times a week - but generally this is because of the hugely compressed training schedule we attempted when making the move at a breakneck pace. Bromcom keeps impressing me with each new bit of automation or other cleverness which SIMS was simply incapable of. I think anyone moving FROM Sims to any modern competitor system is going to see an improvement in workflow etc. Staff here just got their first taste of marksheets in bromcom and we've had nothing but positive feedback about it. My attendance team are loving one click absence and lates messaging - and that's BEFORE we get to the fully automatic stuff like it triggering detentions and sending the parents their notifications.

Update after bromcom_support responded to this thread - eventually a nice deployment manager contacted me from bromcom and did his best to answer my outstanding questions. There's certainly a fair bit of manual importing for some of our custom fields from SIMS - and some workarounds on the school day we'll have to implement, but I'm certainly happier now someone has engaged with us. I understand that they've hoovered up a lot of schools in a short space of time - and they weren't to blame for the exodus from SIMS, but communication is absolutely essential when doing these migrations. I also really hope that they develop some more routines for doing data migration - even SIMS 7 years ago managed to do attendance export and import after you went live. I'm sure in a few months time I'll be happily working away on a modern MIS which doesn't make me want to take a baseball bat to the server every other day - but this week I'm not feeling it. Let's hope the company hires fast enough and keeps the quality of support up at the same time to maintain the good reputation they've had up to this point.

Hoping this is not going off topic - it's an extension of the dicussion because I'm genuinely concerned employers/managers could sidestep complaints by regularly purging incriminating emails before anyone asks for them. My hypothetical scenario is possibly a side issue where something trumps the principal of GDPR - say a member of staff has filed a grievance and the evidence of wrong doing is in an email - would the courts be happy that you've deleted the offending emails (before hearing about a case or a SAR)? So not so much about data - and more a record of commununications with the individual? Or in this case is it down to the individual to obtain copies at the time an offense occurs - because the organisation may not be required to produce their copies (because they've been purged) down the line?

Also don't you have to be careful about this? What's stopping me delete everything related to a SAR every time we receive one?

Our go live (Bromcom) is friday and after my initial massive enthusiasm for the move I've had the worst migration experience I've dealt with in my career so far. Ghosted by our deployment manager for the past few weeks - just been told we have to move the final 5 days of attendance data by hand after go live. Pulling my hair out and my blood pressure is starting to climb. I understand that they are swamped with new customers but I'm seriously staring a potential meltdown in the face right now.

In Facility Scheduler this was really easy - In Nova-T6 I just gave up. SIMS fundamentally doesn't do anything clever with timetables. One of the absolute biggest weaknesses - as it's really not theoretically complicated. I used to run 3 different day structures overlapping each other and it just worked perfectly - because in Facility you would actually use the real times of day in your period start and finish times - you could even mix and match the structures for both students and staff. So KS3, KS4 and KS5 could have a different school day without issue.

SIMS hasn't changed noticeably in the entire time I've been in Education.... Is the only real change between state and independent the fees related bits?

I've phoned them in the last week - got through to a human straight away and had a good chat. Guess it's highly variable. They've actually been really proactive with our case and the guy I spoke to actually knew what he was on about. I used to hate dealing with Wonde but have to admit that my recent call with them really impressed me.

I feel sorry for you having to come from a modern system to the dinosaur that is SIMS. I've been relying on powerbi to do the heavy lifting for the last 2 years - provided you are happy with data being a few hours out of date then running commandreporter overnight and dumping the data into powerbi then it's a much nicer method than using the inbuilt reports.

We're doing it semi manually having collected their options choices via google forms. We've used it properly before - but the number of students I had to manually sign up due to the above issues was beyond a joke. The issue with server load would explain why we can't do more than a handful of changes before it hangs up on us at the moment. Thank god this is the last time we have to use it. Provided we can get all the choices in and some blocking suggestions output in the next 7 days we'll be good. If not it's gonna be a start from scratch exercise on a different system

looking forward to deleting SSM in a couple of weeks time

When KeepKidsSafe was based in a small office up north (sheffield i think...) they were amazing. Even a few years back you spoke to someone who knew the answer or who knew who to go and ask in their team and get an answer. Now - it's an overseas call center and I lose the will to live as they work off a script each time I call. With the move to Bromcom they are getting chucked in the bin once renewal comes up.

So how are you getting your AM/PM into SIMS for your census if you don't use write back?