Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun

What is the underlying issue you are trying to resolve? (i.e. why do you want to see the staff member who wrote it?) Could a report fill the need? Do you use any 3rd party systems that link with the communication log (I don't know if schoolcomms can read as well as write the comms log) and could that 3rd part system do what you are after? To the best of my knowledge this bit of SIMS isn't configurable to do what you want.

Capita have added functionality in to the front end of SIMS to import student email addresses from the Spring Release 2020 The new functionality will require a csv file. The csv file will need a unique identifier for each student, you can choose from any of the 3 options below 1. Surname, Forename, Gender, Date of Birth 2. Surname, Forename, Admission Number 3. Surname, Forename, UPN The Spring 2020 upgrade of SIMS is due out on the 13th March. Once you are on the Spring upgrade you will have a new menu route 'Routines | Data In | Student Data | Import from Spreadsheet', once you’ve selected your csv file to import you will be taken to a matching screen where you tell SIMS what each column represents by right clicking on the column header and picking the required field.

You've got it set to display multiple weeks in Edit Marks, which is why it's hiding the lesson marks. If you go to 'Tools | Setups | Attendance Setup | Module Setup' and change the number of Weeks to display to 1, save, close the edit marks screen and re-open it after altering the setting.

Are you on half term? If so select a week your students are in.

Do you have the option under the group type selector?

in SIMS, Focus | Lesson Monitor | Edit Marks, select your class(es) and drag select the region you wish to add marks to, then click the key on the keyboard for the mark you wish to enter.

Or you could use a single nested if then else using not logic. E.g If you want Column1 = 'A' and Column2 = 'B' then you can do a nested If then else of If Column1 <> A then 'False' else if Column 2 = 'B' then 'True' else 'False'

In that case you want 'Routines | Data Out | Personal Data Output'

I've recently done this to try and find out if a file in the document management server was referenced by name in the SIMS database (and if so where). I had to do an SQL query on a copy of the database in a test environment using this as a string point https://thesitedoctor.co.uk/blog/search-every-table-and-field-in-a-sql-server-database-updated/ This wouldn't look in side the linked documents as they are all encrypted in on the server and only Capita and paying partners can get the decryption key

I've had a similar issue to this where a report I wrote for a school worked fine for some users but other users only gave a count. Are you running the report in SIMS and CommandReporter as the same user?

I can only find the SQL2012/14 booklet that Capita sent me a while ago. Thinking about it more, we worked out our own for 2016 as Capita hasn't updated their documentation when we were doing the SQL 2016 migrations in Summer 2018. There aren't any major changes, the wizard screens are laid out a bit differently and I recollect that we had a few issues with permissions but as it's a standard MS SQL routine there is plenty of information online on how to sort it. SIMSFMS SQL Maintenance Plan.pdf

As an example, Capita recommend the following; Check Database Integrity, Reorganise Index, Rebuild Index, Update Statistics, and Maintenance Cleanup Task.

Do you have an SQL maintenance plan set up to run regularly on your server? Capita have a document about how to set it up if you don't. I've got one set to run at least every 3 months at our high schools. I can't currently find the document on either of Capita's support portal so I guess it is in the process of being migrated from one to the other (or the search functionality there isn't fully up to date).

Is it just returning more results as the academic year rolls on? How many results did you get from the report in late September and how many are you getting now?

We had a primary school who evaluated it before Christmas and decided it wasn't for them. The already have programs that do a lot of what Edulink does but Edulink was only a replacement for some of the functionality so they would need to keep their existing software as well and they couldn't justify the extra cost. E.g. one system generates bills for before and after care club, based on the number of sessions attended. The school don't have any SIM equipped mobile devices and their IT policy states that staff can only use school issues devices for pupil data, thus they wanted an offline mode for the App. Edulink couldn't display the current dinner money balance from SIMS They didn't think much of the mail merge functionality for building emails. (this one I think just needs a better UI) The lack of a payment system integration

SIMS Services Manager is a syncronisation utility produced by Capita to transfer data between the local SIMS.net database and their online products. You can see if it's installed by looking to see if there is a service called "SIMS Services Manager" on your SIMS server. The default install location is "C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS Services Manager" You can download the install from MyAccount if you are Capita supported, otherwise you can get it from your SIMS support provider.

In general, any menu route in SIMS where you can set a path you should set a UNC path, e.g. census locations, CTF locations, Exams setup, etc. You'll only need to use shortcuts for things that don't have a menu route in SIMS

You can get around a lot of those issues by using UNC paths and shortcuts from the mapped S: drive

As long as they have had the Main Autumn 2019 release applied tot heir workstation they will still be able to log in to SIMS. However if you have patched the database and run the SQL application setup exe and their workstation hasn't been upgraded to the Consolidated patch 2 version of SIMSApplicationSetups.exe and they try to access any area that has been updated by the server patch, SIMS will just crash. We've had this at a few schools already.

What you describe sounds familiar but I can't think where I've seen this before. What you are after is the VBA shell function to trigger commandreporter.exe (https://www.myonlinetraininghub.com/vba-shell) You'd need to either use trusted authentication if your staff use SSO for SIMS otherwise hard code the username and password for a SIMS account in to the Macro. Also make sure you have either copied the initial output already or give the new output a different name so you don't get a clash.

Hi Jahir, As It's part of a wider service that we offer our supported schools it's built in to other scripts and processes and isn't a standalone routine that we can just extract, and the documentation is only aimed at schools using our scripts so wouldn't be much help in writing the scripts from scratch. To give you a little more detail we have a report that output as xml through CommandReporter, that outputs student name and class. This has a run time parameters of: course name, today's date and year group (for the main filter to just retrieve those students that we are expecting a result for), then aspect and result set (with an additional filter of Result is null) in the assessment subreport. We then use a config file to specify all the courses we are expecting, and the aspect/result set combinations we want to check for each course then use a Powershell script to iterate over all the combinations calling the report via CommandReporter. There is then a second report with a class focus which returns each class's main teacher, the class name and their email address that I then use PowerShell to match the results from each running of the first report with the email fromt he second and then use the built in Powershell commandlets to send an email using one of the school's Office 365 accounts.

A fast way to find it, is to select the column you wish to delete then click the "Down 5 button" until you get an error saying you can't move the column past a formula it is referenced in, then use the down 1 until you get the same message. This will make the next column the one with a formula referencing it. Once you've amended that formula to not use that column anymore try deleting the column you wish removed and ifg it still has the same error then repeat the process until you found all the formulas.

Thank you for all the comments. The school's interpretation is that they need to keep records until they fall outside their data retention period at which point they need deleting. Therefore on a termly basis they will need to enter the old system and delete all records that are no-longer needed and they can't just delete the old system as there are records that need keeping that aren't in the new MIS. What they are querying is when they receive an update to information that is held on both the old and current MIS (assuming they don't take the time to remove all duplicate information from the old MIS once conversion has happened), then do they have to update the information in the old MIS even though it is only an archive. From reading the various posts above my conclusion so far is that as long as the school states in it's data retention policy that archive systems won't be updated then they don't need to update the old MIS.

We have a couple of schools moving MIS and a question has been raised about keeping old records. The new MIS will only migrate some of the data held in the old MIS and the school's data retention policy says it will keep data for 3 years after a student leaver or longer if they were SEN/LAC/had child protection issues/etc. As the new MIS won't migrate things like historical behavior incidents, detentions, SEN reviews, and other logged events. The schools are asking if, for example a parent gives them an updated address for a pupil will they have to update that in both the new and old MISs until the student's data falls outside their data retention policy or do they need to spend time going through their old MIS and deleting all transferred data like addresses, phone numbers, etc. from the old MIS once the move has occurred? Has anyone seen any guidance anywhere around this topic, a reasonable Google has brought up some vaguely useful bits but nothing comprehensive and most of what I could find was just for a specific school or MAT.

As you have an old version it does sound like the last upgrade didn't work as intended, if you use SOLUS3 you may need to look at your setup/configuration which I'm sure your support provider can assist with