David44

Any other new platform would have gone through an internal process to decide if it was the right product for the school. This is being forced on schools in an incomplete form that would never have passed that process.

If you can get to this page... https://inventry.world/settings/integrations, click on the cog and can see an install button, that will download the latest MSI. I installed that, asked them if we were now on a supported version and they said we were. The communication is terrible. I can't work out if it is incompetence or they are just trying to get schools to sign a new "Cloud Agreement" which they claim is required to 'upgrade to the cloud version'. I pasted the email they sent to our Business Manager at the top of this thread. We didn't sign a new agreement.

I'm not sure a publicly owned school data sync tool would be such a terrible thing.

We will be using Google for SSO. Correct me if I am wrong but I can't see that ParentPay have released the App ID that we will need to grant access to the relevant scopes for SSO yet. We should be okay as we allow staff users to use SSO with anything that only requires the basic data needed for Sign in with Google so unless ParentPay have requested more than an email address in their app, it should just work. It would be nice to know though since if you asked Parent Pay, they would probably say that SSO have been available for years but we all saw what a ham fisted way they implemented their previous attempt. Hopefully they have got it right this time but with a lack of useful information coming from Parent Pay, that's all I have, hope.

Those instructions are just for linking a Google or Microsoft account to an existing SIMS ID account, something that has been possible to do for a while (and Facebook, Apple and Twitter at one time IIRC). I don't think we have an account manager and I haven't seen any instructions on how to set it up yet. I suspect all schools will move to the new SSO sign in page at the same time since we all share the same sign in page, the system doesn't know what school you are from until you have signed in. The KB seems to be an advert for SSO rather than containing any useful information at the moment.

Has anyone managed to use SSO with SIMS Next Gen yet? We haven't rolled SIMS Next Gen out to staff yet and it would be good to go straight to SSO rather than the old SIMS ID system. Most of the documentation seems to just be singing the praises of SSO as if Parent Pay have just discovered it or invented it but there doesn't seem to be anything about how to enable it.

Anyone else have InVentry fail at the most basic function and not include new staff starters today? I'm pretty sure this fails whenever new staff start, they are never on InVentry until their second day, but obviously it is a lot more noticeable at the start of term with a lot of new staff starting.

After going backwards and forwards with various "people" (or AI, it's difficult to tell) at InVentry via email where they insisted that we had to 'upgrade to the cloud version' and allow their support to access our SIMS server (they refused to say why, so that set alarm bells off) and them doing anything other than answering my simple "Are we using a currently supported version?", it turns out that we weren't using a supported version and simply needed to upgrade the sync tool, which is confusingly called "SIMS Installer" and seems to show no version number other than when you go to uninstall it, to the latest version. There was no downtime, there was no remote connection from InVentry there was no 'upgrade to the cloud version' - There is no cloud version. Imagine how much easier it would be if the email had simply said we needed to download the latest version of SIMS Installer and gave a link. I can't decide what is worse, the InVentry software or their support.

We have received this email out of the blue from InVentry a few days ago Anyone else had this? I assume the 'SIMS InVentry Connector' is actually the 'InVentry Cloud SIMS Client Service' that we have running on one of our servers. We have only had InVentry for just over a year so why we have the legacy version of anything isn't clear. That is the extent of their email, no links to more information, no introduction to what 'the Cloud version of InVentry' actually is, nothing. And these people expect us to let them on to our SIMS server?

Group Policy if using Windows. Google Workspace policy settings if you are using Google and users are signing in to Chrome. If you go to chrome://policy/ in Chrome, search for NewTabPageLocation, you can see what, if anything, is applying the policy. There are details on the policy here... https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/?policy=NewTabPageLocation

Interesting, what is the from address? I assumed each admin could sign up to receive or not receive the email alerts themselves.

Has anyone who has turned off SIMS Service Manager or even just SIMS Data Exchange Service within it received an email alert from SIMS Next Gen to tell you that syncing has stopped? You can check if you are subscribed to email alerts here... https://www.home.sims.co.uk/home/systemstatus None of our admins are receiving any kind of alert from SIMS Next Gen when we stop SIMS Data Exchange Service.

We monitor the Windows Service 'SIMS Services Manager' too but that won't help if the SIMS Service 'SIMS Data Exchange Service' stops running for example. Since it's a closed system, the only way to monitor SIMS Services is via the option that ParentPay gives us, which doesn't seem to be working, for us anyway. Has anyone ever got an alert from SIMS Next Gen to say that data syncing has failed?

I wonder if a fellow SIMS Next Gen admin can check something for me. If your sync between SIMS 7 and SIMS Next Gen fails, do you receive an email alert? As an admin, you can see the status and enable email alerts here... https://www.home.sims.co.uk/home/systemstatus I wonder if anyone who has emails enabled and has had the sync fail (or purposely turned off SIMS Data Exchange Service in SIMS Service Manager) had actually received an email alert. We had SIMS Data Exchange Service disabled all weekend and although the status on the page changed, neither myself or a colleague received an email alert. I also just disabled it for a few minutes this morning, still no email alert. Do the email alerts work for anyone?

We've also had an issue where InVentry support have made things worse, or caused an issue that didn't previously exist. The terminals were reporting some kind of network issue. I never do any troubleshooting with the InVentry terminals other than to restart them when there is an issue, it's not my job to hide the faults with this system from SLT, so I raised a ticket with InVentry, they connected in and resolved whatever the issue was but for some reason they also messed up the display of the buttons in InVentry, creating two Staff buttons on one terminal, changing the colour and typeface of the text on one of the buttons so it couldn't be read on another, removing the name of the school on the third. One of the four was fine, so I updated the ticket, told them that they should all be put back to how they were before they fixed the unrelated network issue and that one of the terminals was correct if they needed a reference to work from. They connected in several times, making InVentry unavailable while they did so and just seemed completely unable to reverse the changes they had made. The ticket has been escalated to second line support and it is still open. It's a terrible company to deal with, both because of the underlying product being of poor quality and the support staff not seeming to know how to handle such a product.