BFish

Just out of curiosity if anyone has any iSAMS API scripts they've developed in house? Our school invests in a workflow called Kissflow (love it) and we are trying to get iSAMS student lists into a Google Sheet so that we can then import daily into Kissflow. Unfortunately, after 12 hours of reading and studying I have struck out

Hi everyone, It's been a while since I have posted here. Our school has had a rough run this year with Cyberhound that involved a few months of a corrupted database, having the firewall crash on a weekly basis and requiring a reboot, and a broken sync between two firewalls that somehow went unnoticed for a lengthy time. I was hopeful that things would improve but just watched another botched upgrade where the school's firewall was down in the dark for the whole weekend when we had a bandwidth upgrade scheduled and essentially I had to pay OT to 6 staff members who couldn't perform their job as we had to postpone the bandwidth upgrade. It's been frustrating to say the least as the company normally has good reviews from other customers I have talked too. I have come to the disappointed conclusion that it is time to begin the lengthy search for a new Firewall company and wanted to get your opinions. Our school is about 1600 students, 400 staff, and we run a true BYOD setup involving iPads, mobile devices, Chromebooks, Macs & Windows. We are a top tiered British curriculum school on the international circuit. Our biggest priorities are security and alerts. Currently, we have it setup so that if certain keywords are searched it automatically notifies key staff members as well as more general reports of violations every week/month to year leaders. This was one advantage of CyberHound that I feel will be difficult to find an alternative since it's a BYOD. If it was a 1:1 school provided solution then I would easily look at an application solution. The second is security, which is a huge focal point at a high admin level. We are looking for the ability to get advanced usage reports, very customized web and application filtering levels, bandwidth metering, and an IPS/IDS to protect all the devices inside. I have used Fortinet before (not a fan of their reporting features) and Palo Alto (loved it, but is it worth the price in an EDU environment?). I just wanted to get your thoughts or recommendations.

Independent International IB school here who has been with them for a year. I'm happy to give you an opinion on them.

Hi all, I am close to finishing my first year with iSAMS and will try to post a review at some point. I have figured out most of my UK edu terminology by this point and surprisingly have signed a contract next year as the head of IT at a really prestigious British school within Asia. I am sure there will be some phrases though that will stump me though. In terms of the internal server errors I do want to give other prospective buyers or people who use ASC Time Tables some additional information as it may be beneficial for them to hear from a buyer's reflection almost a year after the initial install. The company advertises several time tables that they support; however, in terms of ASC time tables the comparability is limited to basic features within ASC Time Tables. The install technician I was assigned to informed me that very few of the clients he had worked with use ASC time tables, which may explain why compatibility was not fully developed. ASC Time Tables has a division feature which did not work at all within iSAMS and essentially made using it as a software completely useless. In addition, the way the time table was exported even if all data matched it would cause an error. Ultimately, I went line by line through the export found one single line of code within the export from ASC that I had to manually change everytime I did an export to get it to work. The error checking and reporting information on the structure of the time table on where the error occurred that would constantly cause a server error was definitely a disappointment as a customer. Strangely, they have a really great import module for their after school activities that does give you detailed errors when something is incorrect so there seems to be some inconsistencies on their import functionality error reports for tech admins. I recommend if you are planning to use iSAMS in the future to select a different time tabling software from ASC Time Tables, which is probably used more frequently and therefore better developed on supporting all of the features of the time tabling software within iSAMS. Keith Johnson Time Table would be a good example. Ultimately with how iSAMS handles schedules I ended up having to make an excel document with 8,000 rows to manually create a schedule for our secondary program since iSAMS does not natively support schools who use a numbered rotating day schedule (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, & then repeat). iSAMS also does not natively support multiple schedules so for schools who run more than 1 schedule a day for their school divisions. In my school's example our primary years run a 7 period, M-F schedule where as our secondary run a 4 period 7 day rotation schedule. The tech staff can manually merge the two separate schedules so there is a solution at least but it's an insane amount of manual work. The good news is iSAMS does have supporting multiple schedules for one school on their road map for the current year so hopefully by next academic year they will have some of the issues I addressed above fixed.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to reach out and get some feedback to see how other schools actively maintain pupil parent contacts and parent email groups (parent forms & parent year groups)? My school has done it for a number of years where we have the access the parents input and maintain through the MIS. However, each time a change occurs the technology staff manually also maintains a parallel email distribution list of each student's parents as well as all parental form and year group contacts. Naturally, one of our biggest complaints in doing this way is frequent human data entry errors, delivery mail issues when in bulk without errors, major human resource time maintaining and poor parental feedback on the matter year after year. We were looking at doing any initial parental email exclusively through our SIS system to see if we can improve on the issues I mentioned above. The two drawbacks are it is not mobile friendly and it takes about 2 minutes for an average teacher to be able to email a parent where as it only takes a few seconds in outlook for them to find a parent or parent group to send.

Yup... worst mistake of my prof career.

Hi everyone, My school is an uncomfortable bind. We hired a local software developer to build a cafeteria software and it’s been discovered that students had missing transactions that has been going on for months. The relationship between us and them have gone south and they have refused to alllow the code to be audited by an independent company. I am looking to make an immediate switch. Our school is a Small 400 student school that uses MB / ISams as an international school. I am looking for any advise on what other people may be using or on the matter. I apologize if this is the wrong forum but there didn’t seem to be one on business software so I picked this Incase of someone knowing of a SIS compatible system with either MB or Isams.

Tech support got stumped on these two questions so wanted to see if the community may know who have used it before? My first question involves the attached image to this post. For the current academic year as you can see I have made a schedule; however, no class names appear in the schedule even though you can clearly see a student has been assigned to a class. The same issue occurs for room schedules and teacher time table schedules. Any ideas? The second involves me adjusting to iSAMS from MB, which MB makes doing this so easy. Our school does a rotating block 7 day schedule and repeats. For example, on Wednesday, August 8th of 2017 it was day 1 and all classes from day 1 would be offered. The next day is day two and so on... The next day 1 in August would be Friday, August 11th. This rotation repeats throughout the school year. In iSAMS I thought based off of the 150 page instructions you would create your entire rotating schedule within a weekly schedule. Then duplicate that week for each week of the school year and adjust the day orders within the week. However, I learned that if you duplicate a week it does not copy the classes assigned. Any thoughts or success stories on doing a rotating block schedule?

It's a school that currently does not have a formal MIS system. There's positives and negatives to such a situation and starting on a new platform. Essentially, we can make it the way we want and use as many or as few of the features as we need to for an initial rollout because any system is an upgrade over no system. In terms of support yes they have. However, if you ask a common simple question such as the one posted here and they see your still on the install phase they are a bit aggressively pushy about getting training (Can add up to 6K USD+). That's all fine but our sales guy stated it was optional and schools have easily done it without it so when we made the option obviously we budgeted for the cheaper option with a slight bit of fluff. Since I know this is a forum full of UK schools asking a European translation question makes more sense to come to here, plus way-way faster results. Thanks to all that replied. It was FORMS that I wanted, which in my school we call class sections which is based off of HR.

Hi all, This is a very generic question but one I have not been able to get answered. I am in a slow process of building an IMS system from basically scratch as all my school has is ManageBac/OpenApply. I am American and I know ISAMS was built for the UK educational system so their terminology is different. I am in the process of uploading my schedule from ASC time tables and am trying to make sense of the following: What is the difference between class forms and class sets? I have seen it mentioned often throughout ISAMS and in my teaching manager module it is asking for both. Second question and this is a bit more specific. If you upload your time table to ISAMS and get a 500 server error is this because there is a mistake with your ASC time tables where some set of data issue is not matching your ISAMS variables OR is it a much bigger issue with ISAMS where I need to get tech support? I'm trying to avoid going to tech support. Had a rough first few weeks with them and programming errors throughout the portal. Their response is usually ... "Buy our training program"

Hi all, I am at a techie loss on this one. My school is using the latest Apple Configurator 2. The apps we have are arranged into folders and are deployed through Apple Configurator 2. Everything seems to be working but if a person shuts down the iPad and reboots it, all of the folders disappear. The apps will remain but it will then just contain 4 pages of apps on the main screen. Wasn't able to find anything on searches. Any advise?

Hi there, I have had this issue and dealing with Adobe was a lost cause on the matter. Here is how you get around the error: Install using your Adobe Creation Package that you made. We have been doing this with the .exe it provides but I assume you still can do using the MSI. Once done, download and install the trial version of Adobe Acrobat DC. The product will become the full version as it will automatically pickup the license and settings from it.

Thanks guys. Please keep the voting up.

Hi all, I am doing this poll as research to figure out how school's do teacher laptop purchases on their OS platform. My school is a hybrid (teacher's choose) a few years ago on last major refresh and we have had a whirlwind of logistical problems in implementing when you have staff turnover of 25% and the school is not a pure cloud school (we still purchase software for certain classes and programs that may be Windows dependent).

Hi everyone, My school is a BYOL school in secondary and a 1:1 iPad or Chromebook school in primary (about 420) students and an extra 150 staff members in total. We are currently using Impero (although not for filtering since kids can easily uninstall the software) as an application level policy detection to have a better idea of what the students are browsing and doing on their computers. In terms of a firewall, we are currently using Fortinet - Fortigate 500D. I have a mixed opinion as I think their application level blocking / filtering is pretty good but their reports and analytics leave a lot to be desired. We currently use several VLAN's and a wide variety of policies depending on students / staff credentials, time of day, grade level and Fortigate honestly isn't the best in this area but is okay. We also employ safe search with Google through it and YouTube content filtering. Next year it is time to upgrade and I really want to give special attention to filtering controls, statistics/analytics, and the ability to use active directory integration. I would really like to drop Impero due to the bug related issues but need a firewall that can give me way more information and control in comparison to what our current one does. Currently, our students have to go to a portal when they sign on our Wi-Fi and edit their wi-fi credentials again which lasts only a few hours in order for us to be able to track who is doing what and even then it usually gives incorrect information or very generic ip logs. It's very annoying. If you can let me know of some of your experiences out on the market it'd be appreciated.