Top_Cat

Hmmm. We use entirely local access groups, not the standard ones provided in SIMS. This is because there were too many special requirements, such as teachers having access to all Profiles, all Staff routines below 'Basic Details' being only visible to the Personnel Department and all medical information being restricted to Medical Staff, to mention just three! I don't think anyone can see documents posted by Medical Staff. It was agreed that some administrative staff would need access and this was achieved by making them members of the Medical Officer group. I may be wrong, and your message will make me go and check (as soon as the ICT Team have got SIMS working - the Autumn upgrade went wrong this morning!)

You are quite correct, Vik. The Medical Staff (Nurses etc) have their own SIMS User Group. If an event note is marked 'Confidential', all members of that group can read it. If one of the users marked the status as 'Private', then only that user could read it. 'Public', of course, would mean every SIMS user can read it.

We do as well. Staff at our Medical Centre (we have boarders as well as day-students) use the Medical Events section rather like a doctor's surgery to note every consultation. The only proviso they had, though, was that they did not wish teachers to see this information in case it was considered inappropriate. We cracked this by setting up our own Class Teacher access group which restricted this access. There is, however, a UDF, called 'Quick Medical Note', immediately under the 'Quick Note', which is used to flag urgent and important medical information on a student. This system has worked well for over a year now. The medics mark their entries as 'Confidential', so that only they can read them in the Linked Documents.

I had exactly the same problem as JohnT and overcame it by simply not saving with the Word Save button. I make my amendments and close the template. As it closes, I'm prompted to save - THAT'S when I save! Works every time, consistently. PS:- Why have I suddenly got an advert in my post?

Thanks, Vik, for my in-advertent promotion! I'm just the humble SIMS Manager. However, I've worked in SIMS support for 18 years, on and off - even before Capita bought it! In all my years as a consultant, before settling down in one place, I've never known a school using SIMS which didn't use either SIMS Timetable (which I understand was awful!) or its successor, Nova-T (which they all told me was brilliant!) This is why I feel I'm being taken out of my comfort zone. It's my job to make sure that the Cover Officers have all the correct data they need, that the - very extensive - Assessment Manager and Profiles 7 structures I've put in place work correctly and the Curriculum Assignment processes operate like clockwork. All this relies on the timetable being efficiently maintained (something I would certainly trust Andy with) and smoothly imported into SIMS (this is the bit that still slightly concerns me). My gut feeling, based on my background, is that we have Nova-T6 and SIMS.net working very nicely from my point of view, thank you, so why fix a clock that ain't broken? However, it's not I that has to learn how to create a timetable for the first time and not I who has to satisfy the requirements of a large and very diverse set of departments. This thread has been very useful for me in broadening my outlook. Thanks to everyone who's stuck in their four-penn'orth! Terry Chivers

Many thanks to Keith Johnson for clarifying that the SIMS.net wizard is called from within Timetabler. That's what I hoped to hear. Thanks also to Silvadam for your comments. I will leave it to Andykemp, our timetabler, who is following this thread, to detail - if he wishes - his concerns about Nova-T. These appear to me to be perfectly valid, but then, I'm not a timetabler so I have to rely on the advice from colleagues such as Andy who know more about the subject. I'm only concerned about the Timetabler to SIMS interface, if we choose to switch products. This exchange of views and comments has - at last - gone a long way towards re-assuring me.

Sorry, Andy - no offence intended! You pointed out that the training can be done online - Keith Johnson's website clearly indicates that this takes between one-and-a-quarter and one-and-a-half hours - it is this claim I find unbelievable. If you've been following the thread, I'm sure you'll agree that I'm being given the run-around here. It's emminently possible that there's a timetable import route in SIMS which I haven't found yet, but I've been looking really hard, time may be running out and I'm getting the jitters because nobody is answering my specific questions. All I'm getting is sales-talk from Keith Johnson and some second-hand opinions from Sarconia. I spoke to someone yesterday, at a SIMS software consultation group, who had used Timetabler with SIMS - he liked Timetabler very much, echoing many of the positive comments I've read elsewhere. He didn't describe the exact process for getting the timetable into SIMS but did warn me it wasn't easy and would need some intervention and tweaking once it was in SIMS to make it work. This doesn't ease my anxiety!

keith I'm sorry, but I don't know what you mean by 'the two halves of the process'. I can find nothing in SIMS.net which allows me to import a timetable. Both export and import is combined in a single process within Nova-T, there is no separate timetable import process in SIMS.net. Are you suggesting that the timetable is exported from Timetabler into Nova-T and then into SIMS.net?

I'm still a bit confused by this 'export' and 'import' wizard stuff. Nova-T6 has a routine called 'Export Curriculum and Timetable to SQL' which is a one-stop shop. A single wizard does the whole thing: it exports the timetable from Nova-T6 and imports it into SIMS in one neat process. It sounds like Timetabler only exports the timetable (to where?) How does it then get imported into SIMS (from where?)

OK Keith. You wrote this package which our new timetabler is quite keen on switching to. He doesn't like the look of Nova-T and doesn't think we should spend a shedload on a four-day training course when he can teach himself Timetabler in an hour or two online (I have to say I find this a totally unbelievable claim but then I'm not a timetabler!) Now, I don't care if the timetable is drafted on the back of a beer-mat and shoved into our network via a floppy-disk drive (if you can find one!) However, I carry the can for everything that happens from the Timetable-SIMS interface onwards. It has been working perfectly with Nova for the last two-and-a-half years since I've been here and I don't want to see the slightest difference with things such as curriculum assignments, room and staff management, assessment management or profiling. In short, the timetable has to upload into SIMS perfectly and must behave exactly the same as it used to! Can I expect this?

Is anyone out there using Keith Johnson's 'TimeTabler', instead of Nova-T, with SIMS.net? If so, what's the verdict? How does the upload to SIMS.net compare for example?

We use Profiles 7 for end-of-term reports. Our comment banks offer only blank comments for teachers to write as they wish. However, as they select the blank comment, the pupil's appropriate assessments are automatically pasted in from AM7. This avoids the need to flick to the Student Teacher View to check recent entries. As we use Citrix (a terminal server system) we're fortunate in having remote access to the network through a portal from our web-site. This means teachers can log in from home and work exactly as they would at school, provided that (a) their broadband connection is good and (b) their home PC is not too geriatric! Even so, a large number of teachers still write their comments in Word then copy and paste them into Profiles. The major problem with this is that they often forget to select the comment with the tick box and the assessments therefore do not pull through from AM7. The final report document is designed separately in the Session Manager and the end-result looks neat and professional. I know there are a lot of users like Vik out there who doggedly stick with AM7 and good luck to them - if the clock ain't broken, don't fix it I say. But, if you're starting out from the point-of-view that AM7 is good for recording and managing assessments but you want something slicker for reporting, Profiles is the beast to harness!

It's being so cheerful what keeps you goin'!

Matt V7.124, Build 28, Database Build 3.61.615. You're quite right, it is only teachers today. I think that's the point of the system: getting an urgent message to teachers of a particular student. You will have seen Phil Neal's post. I agree that 'All Class Teachers' would have a wider use. Terry

If you select Class Teacher from the drop-down list you will see all the teachers of classes associated with that student. (Should have asked me first, Andy! - only joking, it's an interesting thread and very relevant) I agree that emailing would be preferable. SchoolComms is imminent here and may be a future solution to that one. Terry

On a day-to-day basis, we have very few problems. Reporting using RTFs can be a bit of an issue because it is never very clear-cut as to where the base templates are held - on a PC workstation this is very straightforward, but sometimes users cannot easily find them on the Citrix network. However, the main problems seem to be during upgrades. I'm never told exactly what goes wrong but I am told that the upgrade hangs on 'Updating SIMS configuration', for example, or that the database 'is corrupted by the upgrade and needs to be restored before re-trying'. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought all you had to do was upgrade in the normal way on the SIMS server then, on the application server launch SIMS to allow the auto-upgrading of the SIMS program files before the rest of the users log in. Perhaps this is an over-simplification of the process, but at this school, Citrix seems to be a black art, understood only by one or two wizards!

We use Citrix right across our site, including in admin. I manage the SIMS database but upgrades are always carried out by the ICT department - there is almost always a problem of some sort! We live with it, but the guy who does it dreads me asking for the next upgrade to be done!! In a previous life (!) I carried out scores of upgrades on ordinary server/PC networks with very few difficulties, therefore I can only assume there must be something about Citrix that doesn't sit comfortably with SIMS. I never get to watch these upgrades, let alone actually carry them out, so therefore Citrix remains a sort of gloomy mystery to me! Not that I'm moaning or anything, but be warned, (sings) 'There may be trouble ahead .....'

@localzuk Do you have Citrix at your site?

Oh dear, I do sympathise! I might be wrong - and Phil Neal, who regularly monitors this website will no doubt correct me if I am - but I don't think you will be able to get any of this data, except assessments, into SIMS yourself. If you have an Access database of Assessment grades/marks/etc, you should export the tables as Excel CSV, or better still if you can, XML files. In SIMS Assessment, set up all the appropriate aspects you need to 'receive' these results, together with Result Sets if you want to make it easier to filter the results later (things like 'Y10 Autumn' for example). Then, using the route Routines | Data In | Assessment | Import from Spreadsheet, follow the wizard by right-clicking to 're-label' the columns with how you want each to import. Difficult to describe in a few words, but a surprisingly user-friendly wizard once you've made a couple of false starts! All the assessments from the spreadsheet will be imported into the pupils' records within a few seconds - magic! As to the rest of the data, I'm pretty sure Capita would import it, but it won't come cheap!!!

You're correct, Fraggle850, in saying there's a new Cover in SIMS.net. You will need a 'release key' from your support team or Capita to use it and training would be advisable. It is far superior to the Nova-T4 version - so user-friendly. I can thoroughly recommend it. As for the the rest of the Nova-T4 functions, about the only other thing it does which T6 doesn't is print timetables, but there's an excellent route in SIMS.net (Reports | Print Timetables) which does this every bit as well, as long as you are working on a Windows 32-bit workstation - it doesn't work on 64-bit yet!

I've been doing the job of SIMS Database Manager for a year now - brought in for much the same reason: to save the sanity of the staff who had just taken on the system! Yesterday, I would have said we'd succeeded in getting an efficient database working well. Today, we're trying to perform the August upgrade and it's failing badly, so I don't feel so confident! Seriously, mmuk08, when we've got over this glitch, you'd be welcome to come down and have a look (we're in Taunton). The trouble is, both Toby and I share the same history - we both escaped from Capita! But don't let that put you off coming to see us both! (PS:- Why don't I get any overseas jollies??)