fraggle850

You can design a report based on a Capita original that you should have in Reports, under the Student folder in the file explorer called Photographs. The original report may suffice with no modification. Had to figure this out a while ago myself for one of our teachers.

I'd sussed the assessment side of importing, yes, it is a magical tool after a few false starts. Have recently had to do a bulk-delete of blanket-set targets for our post-options kids (set in haste prior to my tenure!). Was able to set my targets in XL and import back to SIMS. Pity there's no similar facility for other stuff; I don't have access to the database drive (managed IT environment) and don't think I'd be allowed/able/advised to manually hack it if I did! Doubt whether I'll be able to make a good business case for sacrificing our first-born to Capita to get it done, however we do have fellow geeks at the LA who might be able to do something, dunno... Thanks for the response anyway (chuffed to have found this site, expect more queries!)

Yes, the Reports in SIMS also provide a lot of the functions available in T4 reports however people like what they know and resist change (unfortunately)!

We run SIMS, however there are a number of small Access databases in various admin depts that have been cobbled together over the years (prior to my recent arrival) that seem to replicate functionality that is (nowadays, at least) available in SIMS. I'd like our staff to all use SIMS; any pupil-related data should be held on one DB, not a random collection of db's sitting on single machines! Any ideas on how I can easily import accumulated data from Access into SIMS? Medical info is the prime example at present but I'm aware of at least one other db that should not exist outside SIMS. I was thinking of storing info as documents on the SIMS document server as a workaround but this is far from ideal and will likely alienate the end user(s). Much better to have relevant info stored in the correct part of SIMS, i.e. a pupil's medical info section.

I'm in a similar position to yourself (also based in B'ham as it happens). My understanding is that Nova is part of SIMS, T6 is intended to replace T4 but people are continuing to use T4 because T6 doesn't contain all of the reporting functionality that T4 has. I gather that there is a cover module for SIMS. We don't use it, we use T4 so I don't know anything about it. My understanding is that timetabling should be conducted in T6 and transfered from there to the SQL database. T4 will get its data from there. I gather that transfering from T4 to SQL might cause problems if T6 is also used. This is my understanding of matters but being in a similar situation to yourself I may well be wrong and would be happy to be corrected. There do seem to be a lot of myths in school surrounding SIMS/Nova that have grown over time as users find out what works without necessarily understanding the concepts behind the system.