Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun

It can also be worthwhile looking for an accredited SSU. (I believe there are only 35 of these in the country last time I looked)

there is no way in assessment manager to dynamically add grade aspect columns, you'd need to create a template with say 50 (or however many you think the max is) actions taken columns linked to a grade type aspect with the list of possible options.

That sounds more like interventions than assessment

I do it like this $reportDate = (Get-Date).AddDays($daysOffset).ToString("dd/MM/yyyy") $commandReporterParams = " $reportDate $reportDate " &$commandReporter /TRUSTED /SERVERNAME:$ServerName /DATABASENAME:$DatabaseName /REPORT:Report1 /OUTPUT:"$srcPath\Terms.xml" /PARAMS:"$commandReporterParams" | Out-File -filepath $log -Append -encoding ASCII

Capita has yet to release any functionality to purge said logs, thus without paying Capita for a site-specific patch to do so (which is expensive) there is no way to achieve this without invalidating your support contract from Capita.

Capita has just published their roadmap for the next couple of years and this change request is on the list to be implemented. For those of you with a MyAccount login, you can see it here

I would suggest getting your SIMS support to profile your SIMS server and network during the PD Hour looking for bottlenecks. If you want to do it your self there are plenty of guides on the web, e.g. this one I've used before. The most frequent issue I've come accross is disk I/O bottlenecks.

Just to clarify, you want an Assessment Manager marksheet showing the most recently entered teacher assessment for each subject and each pupil?

I wrote a Powershell/XSLT script some time ago for our schools that runs nightly and puts any data from the SIMS reporting engine processed any way they want it, into an assessment aspect. I've managed to automate everything except the final import, but I've made that as simple as possible where all someone has to do is 'Routines | Data In | Assessment | Import' then leave everything as the defaults clicking next several times, then select all and finish. It took a while to develop but I'm sure you could reproduce it.

NULL= never had a SEN, N= Used to have SEN but after latest review no-longer qualifies for any of the current statuses.

in SIMS.net go to 'Tools | Performance | Options', put a tick in the 'Extended Marksheet Column Limit' (Capita would remind you at this point that ticking this box will stop SIMS working properly with Excel 2003 and earlier version, and this is why they haven't made this a default yet.)

Yes, Options Online has been released to all and is a direct upgrade for Options 6, so if you are using Options you can use Options Online at no extra cost. All it takes is the onboarding to get all students to sign in, from what I've seen of Options Online, it should save a lot of staff time once set up, but I have yet to use it in anger so to speak.

I've supported several of the major schools MIS over the years and for the core functionality they are all fairly similar. I've found schools perception of an MIS can be heavily influenced by the quality of their support provider for that MIS. What are the issues you are having that make you want to change MIS? (As that may help us guide you more towards one that will work for your school.)

When you log in to SIMS, the client reads and write various pieces of information to the Document Management Server (DMS). The DMS is based on some very old technology (I believe it still needs the .net 1.1 framework installed to function) and as such hasn't been designed to cope with multiple requests in a particularly efficient manner. It wouldn't surprise me if the DMS was processing everything slowly using the slowest connection lowest common denominator principle. The speed of the DMS can also be heavily affected by disk speed especially if it is on the same disk as the SQL databases which aren't that fast read/write to start with. I don't have much hard evidence for this, but it is my current working theory for things like this and I have had instances like this in the past where moving the DMS to another server with it's own dedicated network connection and a suitable raid configuration has resolved similar issues with performance.

From within SIMS, you can also run 'Tools | System Diagnostics | Database Diagnostics', If you've had all the patches to enable all checks then it can pick up some interesting data integrity issues, even where there is only 1 person doing all the data entry.

Looks like Capita are finally addressing some of the memory leaks

This is what Capita had to say in regards SMBv1

You need to do as vikpaw suggested except now you can follow KB-474397 afterward to clean things up "Contact your Local Support Unit and request patch 21841. This activates the fix in Check 96 and allows it to remove SEN status history or current statuses of N (No Special Educational Needs), for students who have never had any other status."

I had something similar to this at one school, it turns out their network was configured with VLANs and the new server was put on a different VLAN to the rest of the servers. Because of the configuration, I was unable to see/ping some machines form the new server but I could form the old one.

I've just started trying to do this for our schools, I've re-written the .bat and javascript files in Powershell and seem to be making some slow progress.

The reason it didn't work is you missed putting the tick in 'Use Xpath' Glad you got there, but a warning for th future, notepad can change unexpected things with a basic find/replace especially if there are gradesets involved.

I should clarify, only export the integer type aspects you want to change not all of them When it asks you to specify an XML file, it just wants you to enter a file name to save it as, Capita's wording isn't always intuitive.

The first one.

Download XMLNotepad 2007 from the Microsoft website Export all the Integer type aspect from SIMS (Routines | Data out | Assessment | Export) Open the XML file exported in XML Notepad 2007 use the replace function and tick the XPath tick box in the find field type /AspectFileV7/AspectNode/Aspect/Type[./text()=I]/text() in the Replace with field type D click replace all Save the file with a new name (in case you need to revert any of them) import new file into SIMS. (Note going from decimal to integer doesn't work as data recorded to 2 decimal places is in the wrong format whereas integer to decimal is just adding detail)

You can always use the manual Discover upgrade on the server and SOLUS3 for the agents afterward by doing a standard deployment which will skip the server as you've already done it manually.