clarkcampbell

Hi Mark, If you have Neil Cheshire with you then I would definately approach Bromcom for a demonstration of their software to your line manager and SLT and seriously consider it. Neil is a legend and knows the system inside and out... he has been looking after us for a few years and I was terribly dissapointed when I heard he was leaving as he knows the system really well and can make it do some clever things. I would also consider looking at the behaviour module as something to add to your system at a later date as this is extremely powerful and when we were looking for a e-registration system this was certainly on the agenda from the outset... no point in getting staff used to 2 systems, we have got the registration module and the behaviour element is just another tab in the app, this makes training and actually using the system very easy for staff and has saved us lots of whining from staff as its intuitive. I sound like I work for Bromcom... I dont!! but I cannot stress how well it fits into our organisation and I would at least have them in for a demo and don't discount it so early on. Kind Regards Clark

Hi Mark, Have you considered Bromcom as a solution to your electronic registration? I have used this at my last school for around 2 1/2 years and at my current school for around the same period. The client is called Winfolder and it is made available via a shortcut to a shared install on a server... so, 1 install on the server and a single shortcut for all users. We have some old machines and they run it a treat! The application itself is only 700K and is on the server anyway. The data that it sends back and forward is in bytes or maybe kb's at worst and it works really quickly. All of our staff have access to students home contact details, timetables, photographs and SEN information at the touch of a button (All this information is passed to Bromcom automatically from our SIMS server) We have very few staff who have access to SIMS.net as its a fat client and takes an age to install and upgrade. We also see some benefit in terms of reliability as if the SIMS server is down for any reason we still have a copy of data in Bromcom and can still look up TT's and Students Attendance. All Attendance is also exported overnight to SIMS.net and so we have a fairly fault tolerant setup as an added bonus. Our staff really picked up the client quickly as it is very intiutive and straightforward to use and we are really looking forward to using the behaviour module that we have recently purchased which complements the registers perfectly. All of the guys at Bromcom are helpful and we get our problems resolved much quicker than calling the capita helpdesk. Just my thoughts but I hope they are useful. Kind Regards Clark