Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun

We are working with the company that makes "Document Management Server Assistant for SIMS" DMSA for SIMS (Business I.T. Systems Ltd - DMSA for SIMS | Batch scan) and they are developing some features we've requested to be added to their product. One thing I especially like about them is the ability to export some or all document for a student to be sent to other schools, shortly it will be able to do this as a password protected zip file to make it universally usable (currently it is an encrypted file that will only import in to another DMSA system). Another that they are working on is the ability to import electronic documents as well as scanning documents.

We have designed a report in SIMS that outputs any data from the reporting engine via command reporter as an XML file along with the student's name and UPN, then using the PowerShell script below we apply an xslt template to the output from the report to turn it in to an assessment manager results file (the xslt has the definitions of the aspects and result sets we want it imported in to). Then we just import the results file. This specific script and associated report and xsl file extract the present and absence marks for the last 5 days (4 days ago to today) so the school can use the color highlighting in assessment manager to say if a student's attendance has changed or stayed the same week on week over the whole academic year. I've attached the xsl file )edit: apparently I can't upload .xsl file so I've added .txt to the end) for this too so you can see what it looks like, most of it is the aspect definitions that is exported straight from SIMS. WeeklyAttendance.xsl.txt $SRCPATH="C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\Attendance Monitoring" $SIMSPATH="\\SIMS-01\SIMS$\SIMS" $PWD="Wouldn't you like to know" $Instance="SIMS2012" $command= @' & "C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net\CommandReporter.exe" /User:SIMSSuport /PASSWORD:$PWD /SERVERNAME:$env:COMPUTERNAME\$Instance /DATABASENAME:SIMS /REPORT:WeeklyAttendance /OUTPUT:$SIMSPATH\ATTEND\Weekly\output.xml '@ Invoke-Expression $command $FiveDaysAgo=(Get-Date).addDays(-4).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd") $Today=Get-Date -format d cd $SRCPATH $command= @' & "$SRCPATH\msxsl.exe" "$SIMSPATH\ATTEND\Weekly\output.xml" WeeklyAttendance.xsl -o "$SIMSPATH\ATTEND\Weekly\Results Weekly Attendance WB $FiveDaysAgo.xml" Date="$Today" '@ Invoke-Expression $command & del "$SIMSPATH\ATTEND\Weekly\output.xml"

Thinking outside the box a little you could revert the registers back to just being registration marks, use the quick behavior and achievement to record events then set up a scheduled task to export those to assessment manager (say at the end of every lesson) and display the info in a marksheet attached to each reg group/class. That way you can also add in the functionality to calculate the individual and group total scores. We do something similar but for monitoring weekly attendance but the principal would be the same.

We don't have that issue. Here is a link to a good explanation of how it should work xml - How to associate a Windows application with a particular file type but share that association with other applications? - Stack Overflow

Currently SIMS can't do that. There are many change requests for such functionality. If you have a login for Capita's MyAccount then you can vote on some of them. e.g. Force SIMS password change and enforce more secure password 1212-1157750 Affected Products: System Manager 7 School has made a request to have a time limit on passwords in SIMS and for the system to enforce more secure passwords

The quickest way to create a lot of aspects is to generate an Assessment Manager XML import file containing all the definitions. I've done something similar for our systems here but you need to know what you are doing as it's easy to overwrite something in your system without realising. In short you run a report from SIMS listing all the external IDs for your internal aspects, order it so you get the highest number/code. Create 1 aspect as a template to base the rest off and export it, then I used an xslt transformation pre-programmed with the next aspect external ID, to take a list of the aspect names I wanted and the aspect template file to generate another file with all the aspects I could just import in to SIMS. It's not all that complicated to do if you 1. understand the structure of SIMS Assessment import files. 2. know how to manipulate xml with xslt. 3. have a test system you can try it on while learning.

SIMS doesn't handle finance (other than dinner money) if you want to take payments then you'd need something like SIMS Agora (or equivalent) which can write back to FMS (if you use it)

SIMS Database Employee Merge Utility.pdf See attached pdf for the "SIMS Database Employee Merge Utility" which you can ask your LSU for.

Unfortunately you can't easily put the agent in the build image as when it's installed it generates a unique ID based on that machine which would then conflict with every other machine you built from that image. What you can do though is put SIMS/FMS and/or Discover in the base image then when you use SCCM (or equivalent) to install the SOLUS3 agent it will auto define the machine's roles in S3 so you don't need to do any more work. You'll never have to upgrade the versions of SIMS/FMS/Discover in the build image as installing S3 will automatically trigger an upgrade when it's first booted up.

There is an MSI, if you go in to SOLUS3 and take the menu route Settings | SOLUS3 | SOLUS then click the Export agent installer button you can extract the agent installer MSI which our schools already use with SCCM

Patch 21751 [3.62.377-3.62.377] PRB13039 - Assessment individual report templates gives error if macro setting is Disable all except digitally signed. Patch will provide required digital signature to the template.

You could set your system to only run Digitally signed macros from Capita no mater what location they are in.

If you leave it to log in without intervention, does it eventually get there? If so that could suggest it is having problems communicating with your Document Management Server.

Unfortunately not. There is a change request to add that function [h=1]School Report - Functionality to exclude Non-Statutory Attendance 1601-3441394[/h][h=2]Affected Products: Reporting[/h] Functionality when generating the school Report to allow users to exclude Non-Statutory Attendance. But there hasn't been many votes for it yet.

SIMS takes it's font size from the default Windows font so if you go in to Control Panel > Display you can usually pick:- font size small - 100% (default), Medium - 125% or Large - 150%

Due to the quality of your hardware your times are mere fractions of what some of our schools report. The longest I remember recently was a school saying a 3 page all subjects interim report for Y8 took just under 4 hours. We found some of the SQL waits were rather high for the period and are having Capita investigate but they seem to be struggling to understand the issue.

You can use Mail-merge rules in Word to achieve what you want. in short what you need is something like this { IF {Aspect Merge Field} = true "Tick symbol" "Cross symbol"} To get the symbols to show you need to press Ctrl+A then F9. You could automate this in a Macro to save or set word to auto calculate before printing (option second from bottom in attached picture)

Outside of Capita's MIS conversion service there is no way to import staff details in to SIMS.

The Student details memory leak isn't fixed yet, I had an update today to my case about this issue saying escalation are still working on it.

You can extract the template with macros from SIMS. Just export the report as a .RptDef file and rename it to .zip then extract the excel file within the zip file.

I'm guessing there are stored procedures that update this field based on pre-defined parameters that look at the current date and date of admission/leaving etc. that are triggered from within SIMS under specified conditions. Therefore what Phil says is correct in that SIMS uses enrollment dates but the full answer is more complex than that. Therefore as long as SIMS is used (correctly) then this field in the student record should be as good as reverse engineering their stored procedures to generate your own On-Roll/Leaver list. Having said that, GropupCall is a Capita partner and should do all this sort of work for you. You should just tell them the info you want and they should be the ones working out where to extract it from.

I do use SIMS and we do pre-populate the end date for all students in Y6 around this time and it's never caused an issue. Hence me pointing out the DB field that SIMS seems to use in it's reporting engine for determining if a student is on roll with the school or not.

I agree with Meldrew, but there are reasons someone would want to do this e.g. if they only had a SIMS DB and no-longer actively used it but wanted to get data out without installing SIMS.

I believe what you are looking for is SELECT [current_roll_mode] FROM [sIMS].[sims].[stud_student] and you get NULL for leavers, and current students are split between On Roll, Guest, Main, Subsid and Future.

We've found in recent upgrades that the client side is also getting more resource intensive. As a test we put Solid State Drives and upped their RAM to 8GB in some workstations for staff to use and they reported a substantial improvement in performance. One of our schools has a SIMS DB that's over 20GB and they have a physical server with 4 quad core processors and 32GB of RAM (they also run lots of things that integrate with SIMS such as cashless catering etc. on the server) and they haven't reported any performance issues. We offer our schools a SIMS Health Check and part of it is a technical evaluation where in short we test network connectivity from a workstation to the SQL server, the Document Server, the shared drives, etc. Then we check the SQL wait times and workstation performance.