David44

All the way back to school? What if the student lives 5 miles away and there are roads, rivers and wild horses between home and school?

What keys are you using that support 2FA and printing/door entry?

It sounds like the computer is keeping the correct time, it's just Windows that is not updating the time in the task tray. If it happens on multiple PCs in the same department, it's either because they use some software that no other department uses. Or... it is happening in other departments but they haven't noticed or reported it because those users all have other sources of time available to them and don't rely on the Windows time to know when to go to lunch or home. Purchase a wall clock for the main office and forget about it. Problem solved.

@Theblacksheep Was the post you quoted made by someone from Corinium Education Trust and/or Cirencester Deer Park School?

Does anyone know if when running ArchiveAttMarks.exe if the command should return straight away or should it remain running while it is archiving attendance marks and only return control of the cmd window when it has finished? Running it tonight, it seems to run but I have no idea if it's actually doing anything. How do I know?

The certificate for that site expires 26th December 2023. See you all again in this thread after Christmas when ESS forget to renew it.

What SMTP server are you using? Microsoft? Google? In-house?

If you want a comparison, we have SIMS on premises, just over 1600 students and probably a similar sized database as you and our sync took 4 hours and 15 minutes last night. I have seen it take 5 before too.

Hi Pete, Yes I agree with what you say. sQuid have been trying to blame Groupcall but I am aware they are not the issue here. I forgot to mention, sQuid sent me an email telling me they had raised the Staff Home Addresses issue with GroupCall and asked them to get in contact with me to talk me through the issue as if it were a Groupcall issue or me doing something wrong. I was then CC'ed in to the reply from Groupcall who rightly told sQuid it was their issue and sent them a link to documentation on how to resolve it. I have not heard anything from sQuid directly.

Sorry to reply to a thread that I am already the last poster in but the last reply was during the Summer Holidays and maybe people missed it. I'm still wondering if any other school uses sQuid and have had as many issues as us. As well as the issue of them requesting staff home addresses which I mentioned above and sQuid still haven't resolved, we are finding that the system just doesn't work properly. If we add a student to an offer, then find that student within sQuid and select 'View Offers', the offer is not shown against that student. Maybe we are doing something wrong, maybe there is something different about the students this happens to or maybe sQuid just doesn't work as it should. I don't know because they have ignored, or worse, closed without comment, most tickets we raise. Even if you use sQuid and you have had no issues, I would also be interested in hearing about your experience. @fiza Are you still using sQuid?

I wouldn't trust ESS to do this. There are companies who will create the Google Classroom courses for you, based on the data in SIMS. They will also create user accounts too if you need that. Salamander is one that we used to use. We do this kind of thing ourselves now, using Powershell. We did use SIMS ID, not for account and Classroom creation but for signing in to ESS's own products (SIMS Parent, SIMS Options etc.) and it's really not a good product. It comes with ESS's usual level of support too. You simply need to purchase or create a product that extracts data from SIMS and creates users and Google Classrooms based on that data. Other people will have other recommendations. No one will recommend SIMS ID.

Above text messages or email?

We have created two records in SIMS when a person is a member of staff and a contact. EduLink One is far from the only product that doesn't handle this situation well when the person only has one record. It stems from the fact that SIMS only allows you to set the primary email on the joint record rather than setting a primary email for the contact element and a different primary email for the staff element. As EduLink One, and many other products, requires staff to have their school email address as primary and contacts to have their personal email address as primary, two records is the only way to achieve this. It's actually what ESS recommends now too. Another thing to look out for is that two (or more) contacts can't have the same email address in EduLink One even though SIMS allows this. Look out for things like [email protected] and change it for one of the contacts.

My bet is this is a sharing setting on the form itself. Can you access the form while signed in to your school Google account? While signed in to a personal Google account? While not signed in to Google at all?

I don't believe we can filter the data scopes that we allow them access to. My understanding of XOD is that sQuid (or anyone else) requests the data scopes they say they need and we Approve or Deny the request, we can't change the scopes as a school, it's a binary choice. Unless you know otherwise? We approved the request a few weeks ago but restricted it to only sync student and contact data by using the GDPR opt-in settings within XOD, opting in everyone except the staff. As of yesterday we restricted the SIMS user that XOD uses so that it itself doesn't have 'Access to staff home addresses' and then changed the settings in XOD to opt-out instead, so although in XOD it shows that sQuid have 'Access to staff home addresses', in reality they don't because the user that XOD uses to extract data from the MIS doesn't. All very messy and sQuid are very unresponsive when it comes to tickets (this is far from the only issue). They also haven't explained why they would need 'Access to staff home addresses' for a simple school payment system in the first place. sQuid have claimed that they are unable to change what scopes they request, implying this is a limitation of XOD rather than something they have set up incorrectly. Of course, we already use other systems that use XOD that don't have any need for 'Access to staff home addresses' and therefore don't request that scope so it's very possible for companies to not request this data via XOD. They also claim if they change it, they would have to change it for all schools and not just our school, quite possibly true but that can only be due to the inflexible way they have chosen to create their product. That's why I asked if any other schools were using sQuid and how they dealt with this request for 'Access to staff home addresses', assuming sQuid requests the same data from all schools which is what they claim. Not my choice to walk away or not unfortunately, and we need a payment system for September so too late to move to something else now anyway. Hopefully we won't be using them for too long.

Hi, Is anyone else using sQuid for payments? We planned to migrate to them over the summer after Pay360 closed down at the end of July. The first step is to sync data via Groupcall XOD. When we went through this process it turns out they were requesting 'Access to staff home addresses' which they have no need for. We have gone back and forth with them but on the rare occasion they do respond, they give vague answers implying it's Groupcall's issue and they seem unable or unwilling to remove this scope. If you use sQuid, do they have the 'Access to staff home addresses' scope enabled in XOD? How have you justified them having this? Thanks David.

I will contact Trilby but it's probably more of a Google question. I could rephrase it as, is it possible to have Android apps auto-launch on Chromebooks using Guest Sessions or Kiosk mode or similar?

Is anyone running the signage SAAS product TrilbyTV on Chromebooks? If so, are you using the Android app? Have you managed to get them set up so that they are completely hands-off for IT? I.e. when and if the Chromebook restarts, it goes straight back to TrilbyTV and carries on displaying what it should be displaying? I'd be interested in hearing how you have it set up if you are using Chromebooks. Thanks. David.

We still use CC4 here. I'm sure there are others too. I won't claim to be an expert but post what you need to know and see what happens.

It's possible to change some settings using the Google API but this doesn't seem to one of them... https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/

There are loads of sms providers, including gov.notify that offer free text credits to schools, but I think if you use SIMS Intouch you are locked in to PageOne and the 4p per message charge.

We do the same even though we have AD. The client upgrade happens as part of the login script. At least you know when it's going to install and if it doesn't for some reason you can easily attempt it again. My understanding is that with Solus, it installs when it feels like it and if it fails, tough.

When I plug my Pixel 6A in at night, it won't start charging immediately, it will start charging at some point during the night in time to be fully charged at 6am (when my alarm is set for). I believe the feature is called adaptive charging and can be turned off/configured. Probably not what is happening here as I doubt it would let the phone run out of battery completely.

Stupid answer, use keyboard shortcuts rather than click the print option. Does pressing Alt+P do the same as clicking on print? If so, does holding down Alt+P do the same and then does the next pop up get focus and immediately act as if print was selected? Real answer, don't use SIMS but that's the answer to most things and isn't as easy as just saying it is.

It's possible for the client machines to run a 4Marix Windows service which handles the updates rather than the user. That's what we do now and we haven't had issues with the updates since we did. See https://www.4matrix.com/help/update_help_new.pdf