Damon

I agree that more money is always going to get a better response but I do believe if someone holds the key to this, they would have a lot of negotiating power moving forward. As I say, they aren't handing over their IP in the competition so they retain the ability to sell their services afterwards and make a nice bit of cash. Also, I'm not so sure that there are SME's out there that are offering this. Bear in mind the folks at Wonde/Groupcall and so on historically use command reporter but have probably ramped up to the API to get more since the ESS announcement. Understandably, they would probably only sell the access to the data through their systems rather than the means to extract. This just means it increases the cost of migration to the consumer as there's another overhead to consider.

I'd argue that the position schools and alternative MIS suppliers are put in is shameful but it's clear that there's mixed opinion on this thread and I doubt there's much that can be done to change that. Also, it seems like the money will be going to charity as it stands so rest assured that will happen and an Edugeek member will get to decide. Out of curiosity, I wonder how much someone on the API support desk for ESS earns? My first F/T job was on the CAPITA SIMS helpdesk and I got £14k. That was less than I would earn in the supermarket at the time. I'd hazard a guess that the API support desk might get £30-£35k. The higher amount is equivalent to about £110 a day after tax. That person would have the skill to answer this fairly quickly and take home just under two weeks of their normal earnings. From what I understand, the intention of this competition was simply meant to be a bit of fun to see if there's any SIMS experts out there that will call out Bromcom and say 'of course you can do that!' Sure, in hindsight, perhaps more money would have yielded a better discussion and more interest but this isn't meant to be a formal declaration of what something is worth to Bromcom or the industry at large. They put that on their job adverts. There are people out there, myself included that would enjoy the challenge of demonstrating that something is possible if I had the expertise. If no one else was doing it, I'd spend the morning on it and collect the cash. After that, I'd give them a call and try to negotiate a nice project fee for putting a permanent solution in place.

Another way of looking at this is that someone could do a small amount of work, qualify as the best contribution and get £1000 towards their charity of choice. 😄 Personally, I'd rather that no one needed to spend any time trying to work out whether it was possible to get all of a school's data out of their existing system. I would also prefer it if schools didn't have to change their plans based on the fear of losing lots of data through switching systems. But that's where folks are at right now and I think the end result hurts the consumer just as much as the businesses involved.

I agree. That's why I'm not participating in this either. But, there are people out there who know this a lot better than me and have been starting to reach out. If they know from experience it's all possible then it makes the task a hell of a lot easier.

How long would you perceive an entry to take FN-GM? More than a day? In my mind this is just over half a day if the data is accessible via the API. There's no other viable way of doing it really in terms of a migration path. The way I look at this, I can count around 13 queries if I were to offer up 3 examples of lookups and hit every single point on that list. Queries for the API are two or three lines of code that you can chop up and change about for each data area. You run them, grab a screenshot of the output and tick that one off the list. I should imagine the people that know the API well would know from the outset whether all this information is able to be queried or not and then choose whether they think it's worthwhile taking a punt on it. If I knew the API well and thought it was possible, personally i'd happily spend a day on something for a grand. I think part of the problem is that Bromcom probably don't believe this is achievable via the means that ESS have allowed schools to export data. So perhaps this is an exercise to say 'prove us wrong', if you can you get a grand, otherwise we'll give it to a charity. And likewise, despite the earlier confusion they aren't asking for all the code and documentation on how everything is done, it's just about proof whether this is possible or not. You aren't handing over your IP in this process, otherwise I could understand your important point about value/recompense in our industry. Lastly, I am biased here as I regularly work with them, but a little known fact about Bromcom is that they reinvest 100% of their profit back into their business and have done since day 1 (check companies house). That's decades of money being invested into staff and the products. So whilst you may have thoughts about the company for a range of reasons, I will say that they don't hold back on investing in people because there isn't a queue of shareholders waiting to collect their dividends.

Hi All, As some of you are aware I work as a consultant in the Edtech market, and like a lot of folks on this forum, have spent most of my working life supporting and advocating for schools and Education. I work with Bromcom on a fairly regular basis and saw the challenge as a response to the concerns schools, MATs and LAs are facing at present. Because ultimately, I believe that schools should be able to exercise choice without excess barriers being placed in their way. As a number of you have been commenting about this on here and socials, I reached out to Bromcom and Ali for some clarification. After a chat, I agreed to be a formal moderator for this competition alongside Nick from Finnemore Consulting. Hopefully lots of you know of Nick Finnemore from his SIMS days and now as a well-known industry bod. To make things a bit clearer and fairer for anyone who wants to participate. Here are some key things for everyone to be aware of along with an update on the competition itself. Bromcom are not expecting you to build an application to do this. It's more that you just need to prove it's possible to meet the brief on an “all or nothing” basis. It is very important that schools can get “all their data” from an ESS hosted SIMS database. For example: On the lookup side of things, can you confirm that all SIMS lookups can be exported via the API and give a handful of examples/screenshots evidencing the output? With the Secondary elements - Can you confirm there's an automatable way to export all Cover, Options, Exams, Timetable and Curriculum data. Again, providing examples/screenshots of the output to prove it can be done. Exam candidate, seating and associated room information, Exam award title, award codes and series codes, Exam components such as sitting date, duration and date marks due. Timetables - Can you export timetable bands and blocks with their associated IDs? Timetable classes with periods and room information, Non-Teaching timetables and Period structures. This competition will close on Thursday – 11/07/24 at 4PM BST so please respond here or via [email protected] – Please note: There will only be a winner if they can achieve all of the above as Bromcom need to be able to know they can help schools migrate all of their data, not a partial migration that leaves schools lots of work to do. If there is no winner, the best contributor will be selected and £1000 will be paid to a charity of their choice. I hope that clarifies some things and makes this a bit more viable to do as a fun project but also increases awareness of the difficulties schools are facing. I appreciate the ambiguity had some people concluding that weeks of development work was expected for £1k and that was not the original aim. Please feel to ask any questions about the project.

So what happened for parents and students when they logged in? Did they see any other data?

Just a heads up, I believe if you are selecting SIMS connected on the contracts portal, you will be committing to a 3 year minimum term. I only mention it as many schools have a SIMS contract until April 25 and may want to explore their options within that 3 year period.

One thing to warn your colleagues is that SIMS connected is a 3 year contract. So even if the school have opted to have their rolling year of SIMS to keep options open, they will be signing up to the hosting element for 3 years regardless. Hopefully they can get it removed from the contract.

I'm not knocking the use of SQL, most power users have made the most of all options available over the past couple of decades. I'm just meaning that regardless of reason or how justifiable it is to use SQL, ESS are saying it's a breach of contract. And yes, your expectations are correct regarding how MIS suppliers work with those backups. There would be an initial check by the supplier to check integrity and then the results are shared with the customer to do some verification too. Which does make that element a bit of a moot point from ESS. I've never heard of them taking an interest in the accuracy of data migrations in the past.

To be fair, all the schools and support teams I've spoken to say that the portal seemed to be setup to lead you into making a mistake. Like buying something on Amazon when you don't want Prime.

@vikpaw If you mean using SQL queries to pull data from SIMS then you might fall foul of these rules despite being the customer. ESS are telling third parties that they cannot use SQL queries to gather data and must go through the API which we all know means the crappy command reporter!

As above, this is just down to 3rd party services locking particular files (i.e. using them) when Solus is trying to update the client. The update fails and you are left with a client that is out of date. This means the 3rd party services can't connect to the updated database either as the client is rendered incompatible. There is absolutely no need to reboot in this instance. You simply need to check which 3rd party service is locking the files and then disable those during the update itself. For example, if SOLUS is set to update between 2-4AM, then schedule a batch script to stop the third party service during that time and restart afterwards. Then you won't experience any more of these issues and I doubt any service needs to sync during that time - double check of course! To check which service is causing the problem, go to resource monitor and select the CPU tab. Go to the Associated Handles section and use 'sims .net' (note the space after sims) in the search box. It's basically searching for a file path so that should locate anything that is utilising the sims .net client directory. Then you can stop that service, run the solus workstation check and upgrade. Then start the service once it's complete. Automating this as above is advisable to prevent headaches. It's very rarely Wonde that is at fault here. I think it'll be another third party app. Some of them just leave the files open and locked when the service is running. Wonde doesn't do that and only utilises the files during the sync which often just lasts a couple of mins every few hours. Lastly - You wouldn't have any of these issues with a cloud-based MIS

I think it was a completely new license/contract because it was previously a central one held by the LA and then with the 3yr changes schools had to sign direct with ESS. The LA contracts were ended (in most cases) and schools signed new terms which 'clarified' what they meant by perpetual... Which was so nice of them. Since then they have gone one step further.

I was just meaning the investment in the software side will benefit all. I.e. a bigger budget for testing, dev, quality controls, etc.. Infrastructure alone isn't sufficient to meet stringent quality controls so I'm just seeing this as a potential positive for the rest of their client base.

I could be wrong in my understanding but either way, I think a change to the current approach would be well received.

Yeah I think NI is on their own infrastructure and I'm sure they will have a lot of KPIs and quality controls to hit. The investment in quality to meet those targets should benefit all. Isn't this recent issue about a move from SaaS to PaaS? Which explains the complication somewhat. I'm hopeful that once that move is properly completed then these issues will massively abate.

Haha I bet you enjoyed that email! I'm sure I've seen this issue before and I can't recall exactly what it was but I have a feeling it might be something weird like their default printer. Can you try switching default printer and opening FMS again? You might just be able to switch back afterwards. If i'm right, I think it's polling the printer for access when opening a page with a print icon. If it's one that's offline it might be waiting for a response or lack of one before loading up the page. If that doesn't work, just double check whether they have any files in the virtualstore directory C:\Users\\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ as you might find copies of FMS or Borland files that are incorrect or causing issues. If that's the case, might be worth moving them out of that folder and fixing their permissions for FMS/Borland/SIMS.ini, etc

Historically, you had a perpetual license with SIMS so it was fine to keep a database running as long as you didn't upgrade it. However if you signed up to the 3 year direct license with ESS then you're out of luck as they removed that ability and started charging for you to run an old DB. Have you checked to see what data you actually need to keep for those students? I think the ICO has a guide on that. You might just be able to run a report for those students that dumps into a few documents. Then you can securely store those in case of data access requests. Bear in mind when these requests come it's not like they need a CTF or something, it's just the information that will be sufficient. When I've helped schools do this on the old SIMS Star databases for example, they just needed to confirm when the student attended the school or something like that. However, that wasn't for vulnerable students so I'm guessing there might be a bit more to keep.

What confuses me about this SIMS IPR stuff is that all MIS suppliers are paid up dev partners of ESS, meaning they have their own copy of the SIMS training databases. Where exactly is the IP that they don't have access to already? This is all just delay tactics, after some furore and legal action they might have to eventually relent but by then they will have scared enough schools into staying on SIMS, just at a time when they are trying to do deals on 3 year contracts.

I had a chat with Bromcom about those storage prices too but they are pretty much running them at cost. From what I understand it's due to the way the documents are stored, i.e. in the database as opposed to just a storage container. They are investigating alternative options though. If you're using tons of space up on Assessment reports you probably need to compress images in your templates. SIMS used to fall over if you had a larger file size with templates and since then I've gotten into the habit of using Word's built in tools to compress any school branding before uploading the template. Any saving is multiplied by the amount of times you use it.

That's true, but I believe it's much more straightforward than going it alone.

Check out G-Cloud as that's pretty much what you're talking about.

I just read an article on WhichMIS that was raising an issue where some MIS suppliers have been offering referral fees and revenue sharing for recommending their MIS to schools. I work with a variety of different support teams and everyone tends to say they're agnostic. However, I'm interested to hear if schools have been led by their LA or support team in a way that might suggest they were incentivised to do so. I can understand private companies doing it to an extent but LAs showing bias for cash leaves a bad taste.

You should install SQL Standard first and then run the migration tool to move the databases. Migration tool can be run in lots of diff ways, I would be tempted to run it on your physical server and ask it to output to a bak (i.e. a backup) file. Then copy this over and use DBattach (need to install Sqlapplicationsetup) to bring it into the new SQL instance. You will need to copy over the DOCSTORAGE folder to the new server, reinstall the SIMS Document server services then edit the .config file to point at the new location of your Docstorage, e.g. D:\Docstorage. You then need to restart the Document Server service. When the SIMS database is attached, you can change the document server hostname in the setups menu. Lastly, go into D:\Docstorage and rename the sub folders accordingly. The structure should be pretty obvious, it's something like Hostname\instancename\databasename or something like that. Can't recall exactly as it's been a while. The migration tool only covers the database side of things and runs a few SQL scripts. Redirection services are just a handy way of mopping up any workstations that haven't been correctly pointed to the new server. If you just ensure that you update the connect ini's in all relevant places then you will be fine. All they do is handle a redirect when a SIMS/FMS client tries to connect to your old server and instance. You can actually set these up yourself in SQL config manager if required. Migrating solus is a pain in the butt. You may want to just reinstall a fresh Solus and then use the redirect option on the old server.