David44

It should be possible to sign up for a SIMS ID. i.e. a username and password you use just for products that support SIMS ID (SIMS Parent, Pay 360 etc.) When you click on 'Accept Invite' in the email sent by the system, you actually need to scroll down to see the third party options. SIMS ID is the shown at the top for our parents, students and staff. In fact, they all go to the same page. This page... https://registration.sims.co.uk/ We actually have the opposite problem. All our students have Google accounts and it would make it so much easier for them to sign up to SIMS Student using that account. Capita/ESS keep pushing them to create a SIMS ID though, as you can see the page above makes that option much more prominent. You can see why they do it, it keeps people locked in to their system but it doesn't help the students, staff or parents in anyway. It just makes things harder for them and us. Hopefully we are ditching it this year.

We use Google Workspace and allow users to add their school account to their personal devices. Sometimes users want to remove this profile but when they try they are 'This change isn't allowed by your admin'. I've looked in Google Admin and I can't see where this is being set. The users device is an Android phone. Does anyone know how we allow users to remove their work profiles?

It just gets worse. Capita's latest update now says that schools should wait 24 hours before sending a new invite to make sure the old invite has "cleared the system".

Always go with the preferred name surely as that is the name they prefer, the clue is in the description. If someone doesn't like it they can change their preferred name, not so simple to change a legal name. You might also end up deadnaming someone. It makes me wonder, what is the point in even collecting their preferred name if you are not going to use it in something as fundamental as their username/email address?

It didn't answer your question but it's interesting that Capita confirmed to you that the registration process is confusing but neither they nor ESS since have done anything about it. This is what the first page looks like after clicking on the link in the email. The first thing they see is a box asking for an email address (even though it's labelled Username). People are going to fill in their email address. This takes them down a SIMS ID rabbit hole. Users need to instead scroll down to see the 'register with an external account' button. If they do realise they have been mislead by dark design patterns, going back and trying to register with a third party account afterwards, results in them being told the code is invalid and to ask the school to send a new one. Why? If ESS insist on using a ridiculous invite system as if it's a secret club and not a school parent system, why doesn't it send them a new invite automatically, why do they have to ask the school? Anyway, it seems that they have made it purposely confusing to try to trick people in to signing up to SIMS ID. This is not in the interest of the parents, the students or the school but I am sure it keeps some project manager happy to see the numbers going up.

We hid the timetable in SIMS Parent at the beginning of the Summer holiday. Today, parents are calling in regarding the timetable which they can now apparently see in SIMS Parent. Checking the settings on https://admin.sims.co.uk/#/parent/settings?view=timetable shows that we have 'Enable Timetable' set to Yes and 'Display Timetable' set to No and this hasn't changed since the start of the holiday as far as I am aware. Our term started today but the students are not in yet. The timetable is not finished yet which is why we don't want parents to see it. Has anyone else has the same issue today? I have logged this with Capita/ESS.

I'd be weary about adding a third party service as a requirement of the new account process. It can't be helped in some cases, you will probably need to set up Cloud accounts as part of the process but it would be a bit annoying if the process failed because the what 3 words API was down for some reason. Also, I don't like how the company make it free to convert a location to three words but charge for reversing the process but that's not important if you are just using it as a random word generator.

Could you convert it to an actual date rather than a string and then output it in whatever format you need? $oldDateString = "2021-07-29T11:18:54.000Z" $newDate = get-date $oldDateString -Format "ddMMy" $newDateString = [string]$newDate Or, get-date "2021-07-29T11:18:54.000Z" -Format "ddMMy"

Thanks for the replies. Do you use Salamander syncing to Google Classroom or something else? Is this something that Salamander force on you or can it be configured differently so that teachers are the owner of classes? I assume teachers and students then see '2021-Year7' or similar as one of the teachers of the class. Has that caused any problems? You can probably guess from all my questions that we don't do it this way at the moment. We had a teacher leave mid-year who was the owner of a number of Google Classroom courses. Even though these had other teachers too, the fact that the owner left (even though their account was only disabled, not deleted) meant that the other teachers had issues when creating assignments etc. Having master user(s) own the classrooms would solve this but I wonder if it introduces any other issues. Thanks again David

Parent (or 'Contact' to use the SIMS terminology) records are just people records, people can be multiple things (staff, student, contact, user, Next of Kin? I think) and SIMS looks like it was designed so that one person has one record no matter how many of those things they are. It has to be done this way as if you have more than one child at the school or you are an emergency contact for another child at the school and you change your phone number, someone just needs to go in to your single record and change it in one place and not have to worry about all the places that record might be linked from. If your title is different as a teacher to how it is as a parent then maybe you already have two records. Maybe the person setting up your parent record didn't realise that the parent called TwelveTree was the same TwelveTree that already teaches at the school. This is 'wrong' but as I said above it's how we do it now by design rather than mistake. If you have access to SIMS, look up your own child's record and see the contacts, if it says Miss in there but when you go to Focus> Homepage it says Mrs then you already have two records and you should be able to have a different email address in your staff record to that in your contact record. Of course, if this is a mistake then if you bring it to someones attention then they may just merge the records if that is the policy at your school. That's what it boils down to, how your school chooses to use SIMS. Correctly, in which case you can't have two different email addresses or 'incorrectly' in which case you can.

SIMS itself should, and does, handle this because the records for people (staff, students, contacts (aka parents) etc.) can have multiple email addresses that can be set to Home or Work (and Primary or Main). You'd think for your record you'd have your school email address set as 'Work' and your personal email address set as 'Home'. Unfortunately, many (most?) third party systems and even Capita/Ess' own semi online systems such as Intouch don't differentiate between Home and Work and instead just pick up whichever email address is set as Primary. I expect your school have sent out something to staff using some system and it's sent it to a staff members personal email address because that was marked as Primary in SIMS hence your school now imposing the rule that people who are parents and staff must have their school email set as Primary (and therefore being picked up as the email address that SIMS Intouch uses). We have raised this with Capita in the past, their suggestion is for people who are staff and parents to have two records in SIMS. This goes against every possible best practice in the book, two records for the same person is a big red flag but we have recently reluctantly started doing exactly this. It seems the only way to resolve this issue.

How do you have Google Classroom synced to your MIS? I’m not looking for answers like Salamander or School Directory Sync although it would be interesting to hear thoughts on these or any other products that sync with Google Classroom too. I am really interested in what rules you apply (or the product you use applies for you) to the sync. We already run our own custom script to sync from SIMS to Google Classroom but it's the time of year where I start to wonder are we doing it the best way possible. Any thoughts welcome. For example... If a student is removed from a class in the MIS, do you remove them from the course in Google Classroom? What about teachers? If a student removes themselves from a course in Google Classroom but is still a member of the class in the MIS, do you add them back in to the course in Google Classroom? What about teachers? If a teacher has added another teacher or a student to the Google Classroom course who isn't a member of the class in the MIS, do you remove them from the Google Classroom course? If a course is archived by a teacher in Google Classroom but the class still exists in the MIS, do you unarchive it? Who is the owner of the courses in Google Classroom? One of the teachers from the MIS or a ‘dummy’ Google user? If a teacher has renamed the course in Google Classroom, do you name it back based on its name in the MIS? Thanks David.

Not sure it reveals anything other than that the school likely has a student named April, May, June or, at a push, August on roll. It doesn't tell you that the child involved in the bullying had one of those names though. For those of you exporting a list of student names from SIMS, how do you deal with the fact that students may have left since the documents that you are redacting was written? Not to mention staff who write emails with child's initials or even something other than their legal or preferred name. I like automation as much as the next IT professional but I'd be worried about relying on it here.

Surely word gets around that it's not actually anonymous then. Doesn't that cause a trust issue when you have told students it is anonymous?

If the emails are going to the recipient(s) configured in SIMS Product Admin then it must be coming from SIMS Parent [Lite], right? You could also check the 'Data Collection' section of https://admin.sims.co.uk/ and see when parents last submitted data via SIMS Parent [Lite] and check that that matches with the emails received by the Admin staff. Presumably the from address of the emails should give it away too. The final clue is that SLG was an old Capita product (SIMS Learning Gateway) so that being in the subject line also points to it being from Capita. It's SIMS Parent/Capita sending the emails. Case closed! You are correct, it's ridiculous that Capita don't allow school staff to see SIMS Parent or SIMS Student but then have most error messages say 'Contact the school'. The best you can do is look over a students shoulder or hope you have a member of staff who is also a parent.

We see the error on https://schoolname.cpoms.net/dash but not https://schoolname.cpoms.net/ or any other CPOMS URL. Is that the same for everyone?

Add me (or one of my users) to the list too.

Isn't the solution here to ask for their school email address or username instead of their name? That should make it much easier to cross reference with a list of students to quickly see who hasn't completed the form.

Wouldn't the card have a unique number too, so that card could be disabled if reported lost or stolen?

I've also written a Powershell script for this but I am using the PSGSuite Powershell module (https://psgsuite.io/) and as we don't have AD groups for classes I am calling CommandReporter.exe to get the data straight from SIMS. As with so many of these type of things each school is slightly different which is probably why there hasn't been a one size fits all solution offered either commercially or via EduGeek for this. My script makes assumptions that are true of this school but may not be true everywhere. I wonder how people are dealing with archiving classes at the end of the year? Or do you leave that to teachers to do themselves?

Has anyone looked at the ForceBrowserAuth registry key? I have been meaning to for a while but haven't got around to it. As far as I can see, this forces the authentication to happen in the browser where the user is already logged in or probably at least has their credentials saved. It sounds like it would streamline the log in process, even if it doesn't get rid of it completely. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has tried this.

Does SMART Notebook Basic 19.1 work on non-Smart boards?

Hi, We plan to use SIMS Options Online. As far as I can tell, students need to have the student box ticked and Parents need to have the Parent box ticked in Product Admin before they can access it. Other than clicking 3500+ times, once in each box, how do you tick the parents box for all parents and the students box for all students (or better yet, all students in a year group and all parents of students in year group)? Thanks. David.

According to the notes on the Android app, Google login is in beta.

Can I ask where you purchase the tills from or even just the model of the till you are using with CRB Cunninghams so I have something to search on? We have been quoted over a grand per till and I am sure we can find cheaper than that. They are just PCs with a touchscreen monitor after all.