David44

Same again today for everyone or just us? I've raised a call with Capita, they have escalated it to the Finance Team. Which sounds like the wrong people to fix this kind of problem and that was at 11:41 this morning anyway.

Hover over the next/previous buttons and a tool tip should tell you what the shortcut is. Ctrl+> seems to be the answer in some screens but SIMS may not be consistent between different screens. Alt+F4 is my favourite one when it comes to SIMS.

Ignore it. Not your problem.

Are other schools seeing messages similar to this when parents try to [re]register with SIMS Parent? "Account Already Registered. You already have an identity registered for [name of school]. Please login with your existing 3rd party identity. Your 3rd party login is your Google account. The account registered is '[email protected]' It doesn't always say Google, whatever third party they used to register initially. The parents do not show in 'Unregister users' in SIMS Product Admin so I can't unregister them. Logged this with Capita but have just got the usual wall of silence.

What a wild ride.

What other USB (or otherwise, I suppose) devices are connected to the computers with this issue? If the case changes with caps lock then the computer is seeing something 'typing' a. Do you have a whiteboard connected? If it only happens on [a certain type of] password prompt screen then could it be some credential offering device? I.e. A bio-metric or card reader that would allow users to login without a password? Even if that isn't what the device is being used for.

Don't know how many students are in your test data But looking purely at the example file you have uploaded, is CHINESE a valid value for Ethnicity? Looking at the spec here... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/682670/CTF_18_technical_specification_v_1_0.pdf and the Common Basic Data Sets here... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/common-basic-data-set-cbds-database ...I am still not sure either way. Try changing CHINESE to CHNE? Does SIMS accept that? Once again, I am not an expert on any of this so take my advice with a pinch of salt.

If caps lock is switched on, does an uppercase 'A' appear? If so, then something is acting as a keyboard and typing 'a'. If not, then the 'a' is probably getting there some other way. I can't think what it would be in either scenario but it might help you narrow it down.

Might be worth you posting the whole exception message that SIMS generates. It could give someone the clue they need to work out what is wrong. Note: I don't know the answer to this. I am guessing. But... If you got a number of errors telling you that the XML was wrong and then after fixing these the file crashes SIMS, maybe by fixing the errors you have inadvertently changed something about the file itself. For example, if you opened it in Notepad to fix the issues and then saved it, you may have saved it with UTF-8 encoding when SIMS expects Unicode (or vice versa). Open it in Notepad again and then 'save as' and check what the encoding is set to at the bottom right of the 'save as' window. Try changing it. I know SIMS can be fussy. I also notice that some data is URL encoded (i.e. instead of spaces, you have %20). Look at the StreetDescription node for example. Unless the documentation says otherwise, is it worth converting these back to spaces? Even if it doesn't resolve the problem, you probably don't want to import the data like that anyway.

I don't think that functionality works or at least not properly. I can't remember the details but I believe if you have a Year 7 Parents Evening for example and only target it to Year 7 students, parents of other years will also see it, so parents end up seeing events they are not interested in. We have this logged with Capita and they have acknowledged its an issue ("The status of this Problem record has changed to Pending Development") but only in reply to a ticket, they haven't published a list of known issues with SIMS Parent. They have left it up to each school to discover them individually.

Good luck, you are going to need it. As you have discovered, there is no way for school staff to see what parents see in SIMS Parent. Look out for other great design decisions from Capita too. Oh, and a registration process that even when it is working is overly complex and requires staff to manually send out 'invitations' to parents before they can sign in.

Thanks Aaron, We see the message... at the top of SIMS Agora now (while logged in as an Admin anyway) and the problem was fixed over the weekend. Good that they actually acknowledged the issue, even better that they fixed it.

In Scratch 1.4, which is the last desktop version we used, we created a Scratch.ini file with the following contenrt... [Global]ReduceCPUUsage=0DynamicConsole=0ShowConsole=0DeferUpdate=1ReduceCPUInBackground=03ButtonMouse=01ButtonMouse=0UseDirectSound=1PriorityBoost=1B3DXUsesOpenGL=1CaseSensitiveFileMode=0EnableAltF4Quit=0VisibleDrives=N:,W:Home=N: I believe this resolved the issue for us. Whether it works in later versions, I do not know.

In your example, surely Parent 3 shouldn't have parental responsibility for Parent 1's child? Why aren't you using the parental responsibility field to determine who sees reports etc. rather than a UDF?

Hi, I wonder if anyone else who uses SIMS Agora can confirm they are able to generate invitation codes for parents today? We can't and haven't been able to since yesterday afternoon. I logged it with Capita yesterday but don't expect any response. If this problem affects all/multiple schools then I won't bother to chase it, if it only affects us then I will have too. To recreate, while logged in as an admin user, in the Users screen, select a student, find the parent you wish to invite, click on the 'Generate Invitation Code' button and see error 'Unable to perform requested action' next to the email button. This happens for us with new parents and parents who already have an invitation code. We can still generate and send invites to employees. Anyway, if you can confirm either way that you do or don't see this same issue, that would be very helpful. Thanks. David.

Hi, We are looking at creating a Google Classroom course for every class from our MIS (SIMS in our case). The actual process seems easy enough using Google's APIs but how are schools linking the two sets of data? Classes in SIMS have an ID and courses in Google Classroom have an ID but they are each assigned by their respective systems. I can't write the Google Classroom ID back to SIMS and I can't (as far I know, correct me if I am wrong) write the SIMS classId to Google. I did consider creating an AD group for each class and having both IDs stored in that but that seems quite a lot of overhead that I would like to avoid. My other thought was to have a CSV file acting as some kind of look up table to link the IDs. Anyway, I'm opening to suggestions and would be interested in how others have already solved this problem. Thanks. David.

What do you do with requests to create and upload CSV files of student (and sometimes staff) data to various companies? This is usually so that students can log in to the companies websites. We are getting so many of these kind of requests recently, they are all going through the GDPR checks and we are happy that the data we are uploading is proportionate to the purpose of the website but each website invariably makes it very easy to upload all student data but then makes it difficult or least very time consuming to make changes to it or remove it. For example, we upload data to My Maths as a CSV file containing data for 1500+ students. The CSV file looks something like this... "Class","Forename","Surname" "Ma/123","Shaun","Wallace" "Ma/999","Mark","Labbett" Imagine that but with 1500+ lines of data. Pretty easy to create the CSV file, we have a script that pulls out the correct fields from SIMS for each company. The problems come when a student changes their name or Maths class. As you can see from the data that My Maths expects, there is no unique identifier included in the data. If I upload a new file containing... "Class","Forename","Surname" "Ma/123","Sean","Wallace" the system is just going to add a new student called Sean Wallace rather then update the spelling of the existing student Shaun Wallace. The only way to amend this data is to sign in to the My Maths website and use their front end to do it. This is an extremely time consuming process and means the data these companies hold can very quickly end up incorrect and out of date if we don't devote a lot of time to each of them. I have used My Maths as an example here. There are others of course. Kerboodle is another one that expects a CSV file and it actually does use a unique identifier column (we supply the admission number IIRC). However, if you upload a CSV file containing a line with a unique identifier that is already in their system, rather than update the existing record that it has identified, it rejects the whole CSV file. I've just been asked to create a CSV file for Hegaty Maths. This is another one that doesn't use a unique identifier field so it's very easy to upload a file with 1500+ lines of data but it's then not as easy to keep this up to date when names change or students leave. Why can no one come up with a workable CSV system? I want to upload a CSV file (ideally via an API, but I am happy to click browse on a website and do it that way), if the record exists update it with data from the CSV file and if the 'delete record' column in the CSV file is set to true, delete the record. It can't be that hard, can it? I suppose the problem is that these systems are sold to teachers on the strength of the learning resources and not the strength of the user administration, the companies then make a claim that they are GDPR compliant because, at least on paper, we are able to amend and delete the data so that means SLT are happy too but when it comes to the actual practicalities of managing this data, it's a nightmare of different web front ends which all work in different ways. I don't suppose there really is an answer to this but I just wanted to know I am not the only one going through this process.

The only time I ever see Hosted SIMS mentioned is on the Capita Service Status page where it seems to be constantly not working correctly. https://myaccount.capita-cs.co.uk/Notifications/capita-hosted-services-status-page/

It seems to be back now. While it was down, someone from the Capita Help Desk phoned me about something else. I asked him if he was aware that SIMS Parent and SIMS Student were down and he wasn't. It had been down for about 45 minutes at this stage. He then asked his manager who was also unaware. He then put me on hold for a while and when he came back he said he and a few colleagues had tried logging in themselves and there was now a 'known problem'. Who it was known by was not explained. Anyway, it looks like it is back now and still no official confirmation from Capita that there was even a problem. The service status page was not updated at all. It sounds like their help desk are in the dark as much as their paying customers though.

Neither students or parents can login to SIMS Student or SIMS Parent currently. When they log in they get a brief flash of the website but then it immediately redirects to an unauthorised error page. Capita haven't acknowledged the error. Is this the same for everyone else too?

Is there anyway to change the display name in G Suite, i.e. the name that appears when a G Suite user emails someone? I see we have the option to make it either 'First, Last' or 'Last, First' but nothing else like First initial followed by surname. I suppose we could change the users first names to just their first initial but that seems a little hacky. Has anyone found a way of doing this, so emails come from JSmith rather than Joan Smith? If not, has the fact that Teacher's first names are visible to students caused any issues?

<#Script to create NewContacts.csv file based on the data from contacts.csv but listed in reindexed priority order for each SID.#>$records = Import-Csv -Path .\contacts.csv | Sort-Object -Property SID, PRIORITY;Remove-Item .\NewContacts.csv;$previousPriority = 0;$previousSID = 0;$priority = 1;foreach ($record in $records){ if ($record.SID -eq $previousSID) { $priority ++; } else { $priority = 1; } $record.PRIORITY = $priority; $previousSID = $record.SID; Export-Csv -InputObject $record -Path NewContacts.csv -NoClobber -Force -NoTypeInformation -Append} EDIT: Turns out I can't post Powershell here as the site is stripping out the carriage returns. Anyone know how to post here so it appears readable? Anyway, the code itself should be good even if it doesn't look very pretty.

So your example data should look like this...? "CONTACTID","PRIORITY","SID","LASTNAME","FIRSTNAME","RELATION" "109","1","390","Smith","John","Father" "110","2","390","Smith","Jack","Grandfather" "116","3","390","Smith","Jill","Grandmother" "115","1","560","Smith","Sarah","Mother" "110","2","560","Smith","Jack","Grandfather" "116","3","560","Smith","Jill","Grandmother" "115","1","642","Smith","Sarah","Mother" "110","2","642","Smith","Jack","Grandfather" "116","3","642","Smith","Jill","Grandmother" "107","1","921","Smith","Jane","Mother" "112","2","921","Smith","Sean","Father" "110","3","921","Smith","Jack","Grandfather"

To try to clarify what end result you are looking for, are you wanting to flatten out the list of contacts? So if a single student had contacts like this... 1 Mother 3 Father 4 Grandfather 7 Doris down the road You'd want them to end up with contacts like this? 1 Mother 2 Father 3 Grandfather 4 Doris down the road So you want to reindex the contacts? I am assuming this is your MIS database and you don't want to/can't write directly to it? I expect SQL would be the best way to do this if you could write back to the database. If not SQL, how do you have the data (CSV? XML?) and how do you want the data? Will you be giving this data to a human to make the required changes?

Thanks. I suppose that makes sense because you may still want to wipe school data from the device after the user had been disabled.