Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun

We've found that once set up staff at schools found it useful for filtering their own data for the groups they are interested in. I agree it's a bit faffy to set up but once it is set up it's generally reasonably easy to maintain. I would highly recommend to start by defining what you want to analyse and only make graphs for doing that, otherwise you will quickly end up with hundreds of graphs. I also find the Discover Dynamic Groups very useful for further analysis in SIMS.

I've only just come across this thread and thought I'd add my 2p worth. We support a special school who is contracted by the LA to run the PRU. As such they have 2 separate DfE numbers but are run as 1 establishment (shared buildings, staff, kids who sometimes move registration from the PRU to special or vica verca). Like a few others here they tried SIMS PX but ditched it 2 terms in to the process. Instead a few years ago they opted to maintain 3 SIMS databases. The combined database all staff have access to and their VLE is plugged in to it and they do almost everything from this database. The other 2 are basically ghost databases who's only purpose is to do a census return for the 2 DfE numbers at the required points in time. The 2 ghost DBs are looked after by 2 admin staff and all they do is every week is CTF in new students to the appropriate DB and make leavers leave from them as well, and the only thing we couldn't transfer in any other way, was exclusions so they are manually added weekly. Then just before a census all appropriate pupils for each DB are CTF'ed in to update their details and a report is run on the combined DB to give the attendance that needs feeding in to census, then other than the usual data cleaning that goes on during census they are largely done. There is a little more to it than that but the school find it by far the easiest option (by a long way compared with maintaining 2 DBs and educating staff which one to put data in) Then on the combined DB they use the house system to identify which school the pupils legally belong to. If you're interested in more detail or would like to speak to the school drop me a message and I'll try and facilitate it.

If you do have issues with WMI, I've found salvagerepository on each affected workstation can fix most of the issues. I wrote the following script in PowerShell (usual disclaimer about understanding scripts before running them on live systems, etc.) which reads a simple line per computer list of workstations stored in the computers.txt file and using psexec.exe executes the generated batch file on each of them. Set-Location C: $pathS3 = "D:\SOLUS3" $arrComputers = Get-Content $pathS3\computers.txt $wmiBatFile = @" whoami > "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 Echo %date% %Time% >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 c: cd "C:\Program Files\Solus3" dir >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 net stop "IP Helper" /Y >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 net stop "Windows Management Instrumentation" /Y >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 winmgmt /salvagerepository >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 winmgmt /resetrepository >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 net start "IP Helper" >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 net start "Windows Management Instrumentation" >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 net start "Security Center" >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 net start "SMS Agent Host" >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" 2>&1 Echo %computername% >> "C:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.log" "@ foreach ($strComputer in $arrComputers) { if (Test-Connection -Computername $strComputer -BufferSize 16 -Count 1 -Quiet) { $output = "\\$strComputer\c$\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.bat" $wmiBatFile | Out-File -Encoding Default $output $psexec = $pathS3+'\psexec \\'+$strComputer+' -s -h -i cmd /c "c:\Program Files\Solus3\FixWMI.bat"' Write-Host $psexec Invoke-Expression $psexec $user = gwmi win32_computersystem -comp $strComputer | select Username,Caption,Manufacturer if ($user.Username -eq $null) { write-host “Online:” $strComputer “no-one is logged in, sending re-boot command" Restart-Computer -ComputerName $strComputer } else { write-host “Online:” $strComputer "user" $user.Username “is currently logged in, please manually re-boot machine once it is free” } } else { Write-Host “Offline:” $strComputer ", no WMI fix could be preformed"} }

A tip for swapping grade type aspects, if you are creating new ones, give them the same gradeset as the ones you want to swap them with. Then clone your template and use the aspect swapping routine to change the aspects tot he new ones, then before entering any results in the new aspects you can change their gradeset to any other gradeset you want and just tweak the formulas. This has saved me hours of re-creating formulas when needing to make fundamental changes to grade type aspects.

I don't know if it's relevant but Capita have recently released this "Patch 21691 [3.62.261-3.62.377] Optomisation from Get Results stored proc" which I've been told by their help desk "this optimisation Patch affects the entirety of Assessment Manager 7."

You can restore the last night's backup with a different database name or to another computer, temporarily alter 1 connect.ini to point to it. Then open the old SIMS, export the results as a results file and import it in to the live SIMS database and remove the backup copy of the SIMS database afterwards.