Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun

have you seen this possible cause of the issue https://customer.support-ess.com/csm?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0051627?

You shouldn't make changes to the comment banks once teachers have started entering selections because SIMS records the selections as Subject, section number, comment number. So if you change the order or number of the comments, then what you get in the end could be different from what the teachers selected. Your trainer should have gone through all that when you were taught how to use the module. As it was never designed for a mid selection change for comment bank there are no facilities to accommodate it. To be safe I'd make the current session inactive and start a new one for teachers to enter their data now you have made changes otherwise you will get some very unpredictable results.

You can create a quick report to show you that (see attached image)

Here is the documentation for it SIMS.net Third Party Reporting SDK.chm.zip

I'm guessing someone has been into Tools | Performance | Options and ticked Show Forename Surname in Marksheets. If you untick it, then it will go back to how it was.

How automated do you want to get? I'm assuming for the manual process you are running SIMS.net | Reports | Lesson monitor | Selected Student Reports | Percentage Attendance Report for the whole school year to date then altering the dates for the last week and running it again. If you wanted them side by side you could then copy/paste into Excel which took me the whole of 3 minutes so not a very large amount of time to try and automate. You could write an Excel Macro to automate it, or use Power BI, it all depends on who your intended recipients are and what they are doing with the data as to what the best way to speed up the process would be.

yes you can delete the ones who have never logged in. The others you can check the user access log to see if they are still used this term and if not deactivate them (which should be done when the staff member leaves for security reasons anyway)

SIMS Database Employee Merge Utility.pdf ESS changed the patch number to 25628, you can request it to be released on SOLUS. I've attached the handbook that goes with it. The process is rather simple (though the document isn't particularly easily readable), you make a duplicate staff member linked to the system manager user account, rename the existing staff record to prefix the forename with zz and run the DBDiagscript to check it is all OK then if it is run the patch.

The 'don's include in census' option is only for staff. All single reg or dual main pupils get included in your census and sent to the LA with the automated data collection.

Another way to do it is in Discover where you can set up a Dynamic group so when a new student gains the desired flag in SIMS it is automatically added to the appropriate group.

It may be a question for the Cisco forums on how to set up the VPN to achieve the desired redirection/forwarding

ESS says "The following ports must be open on the firewalls of all devices in the deployment environment:  TCP port 52965 (this port can be changed when installing the Deployment Service)  TCP port 52966 (this port can be changed when installing the Deployment Service)  TCP port 8739. The following ports must be open on the firewalls of all devices in the Deployment Environment to enable browsing of the network (NetBios):  TCP port 139  UDP port 138  UDP port 137." can you ping the machine by computer name and can you browse to the c$ share on the computer from the SIMS server when it is on VPN?

Yes I believe that is the correct page to look at. There is a permanent link button at the bottom of that page (https://prodess.service-now.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0037319) which should work when they update it.

I needed to update my test system to Autumn anyway so I deleted all the files in my documentation folder so the upgrade would re-create any that were needed. Here are the ones it put back in as part of the upgrade When I first went into SIMS it opened file:///S:/SIMS/Documentation/WhatsNew_main_eng_sec.pdf so I guess it is hard codes to open the version that is relevant to your database settings.

If you look in the file C:\Windows\SIMS.ini on the machine you are running SIMS from. There is a line that starts SIMSDirectory=. If you go to the location after the = there should be a sub-folder called Documentation. That is where each machine looks for the release notes. If that parameter is configured differently on your SIMS server to your workstation than the new documents will be placed in the server's defined location after each upgrade.

If you'd like to see this become a global option then you can vote for a change request that was raised last year for it https://ess-sims.ideas.aha.io/ideas/SIMS7-I-9. ESS are putting in a good number of change requests with each SIMS 7 release since Capita sold it.

Here is a link to their progress so far and their plan going forward. Some of our schools are already using "Next Gen" take registers and the pupil's contacts slice too. The take registers slice writes back to the SIMS 7 database as well.

I work for an MIS support team and we are looking at the GOV.UK Notify service for our schools. From my understanding, state funded schools get an allowance of 10,000 free text messages a year, and then the option to purchase more at 1.72p (+VAT) each after the free allocation is exhausted. There are API integration options but I have yet to find a schools messaging provider who integrates with this service despite it being significantly cheaper than their current offerings. Does anyone currently use this at all? If so how have you found it?

You can just do an Edition upgrade (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/upgrade-to-a-different-edition-of-sql-server-setup?view=sql-server-ver16). In short everything stays the same but you go from the express edition to the full edition.

ESS have since added it in to the standard SIMS reporting engine so you can now write a report in the data area: Communication | Emergency alerts

We use Power BI very successfully to analyse attendance including comparisons to the national averages.

No this was just a SIMS focused guide for general housekeeping sims data.

If you do use an SQL maintenance plan, remember to transfer the usernames and passwords (via a stored procedure int he SIMS database) from the system database in to the SIMS database before you back it up otherwise you may lose some passwords.

ESS have a KB article about it here.

Set the effective date in the Individual Report to be the date the teachers finished entering the data for the reports, that way it won't include any of the new pupils and everyone should have a result to report on.