snowmonkey

To be honest in the 3 years we used e1 the online aspect made absolutely no difference. In fact it probably had a negative impact, for example, importing and exporting CTF files, you have to upload and download them and they do it in cycles so when you upload a CTF into e1 you have to wait til the next 'cycle' for the file to be imported, the usual cycle time is about 5 mins but on occasion was (a lot) longer and sometimes you can have imported the CTF only for the pupil(s) to not appear in any year group despite the file having imported successfully!?! Also when your internet connection goes down thats it, you cant do anything! They sell you the online aspect with tales of teachers being able to register students away on trips etc but some teachers couldnt register classes in the school building so they arent likely to do it on a mountainside either!

I used to work in a school that used Pearson e1. Having just started a new Data Manager job in a new school that uses SIMS I can now compare the two and if it were up to me I would choose SIMS. Its just far better and far quicker to acheive simple tasks. With e1 we had to have lots of Access Databases for functions that e1 simply couldnt perform, we also had to keep running an old copy of Phoenix Gold just so that we could perform the staff absence and cover because the way it works in e1 is too labour intensive. In fact I would say that is the main problem with e1, its far too labour intensive in every way. You feel like you are going 'around the houses' so to speak to perform very simple tasks, such as changing teaching sets, timetables etc, it all takes a lot more time than it should. Also the support staff, whilst very freindly come across as not having a clue about how to solve any of the problems and always have to call you back. From what little time i've spent using SIMS so far it appears to not suffer from these problems, whether there are other problems I havent faced yet only time will tell, but my advice is steer well clear of e1.