RogueOne

I have just been on the SSRS course myself, and I find it insanely complicated. However, I have a much better understanding of it now and would encourage you to do the same (not cheap mind). I did Levels 1-3 in a 2-week blitz after stamping my feet at my school for the funding. There are a lot of reports already created for AL for attendance. Are you signed up for the Advanced Support website? You can access reports they have built through that, so you might find what you need there rather than reinventing the wheel. I feel your pain though, I was completely floundering this time last year. If you just migrated, did you bring over last years data with the migration? Just checking.....

Attendance is not something I have enough experience with I don't think, sorry. I will ask my attendance officer for you though. Have you tried the Helpline? It has gotten much better in the last year and the staff there now have a lot more experience too.

So I started using Progresso last September (after being a SIMS user for 5+ years) but the school has had it three years, and I am still not that impressed. Many things have improved it is true and the 'sharding' which took place a few months ago speeded things up (only very) slightly. I understand many more improvements are being planned, but that doesn't excuse the fact that the school was sold an unfinished product in the first place. We have recently purchased Go4Schools and I'm busy setting that up, and teachers will essentially only be using Progresso for registers and some minor admin. everything that Go4S does Progresso should be able to do, but doesn't (we were told by Advanced themselves that Markbooks wouldn't work, had to use Assessments instead and paid a consultant to sort them out for just one department at great expense and they still didn't work in any way close to what we needed). We were seriously looking at migrating to SIMS, but G04S has at least taken the pressure off that. However, Admin staff are quietly going nuts currently inputting the results from the latest Data Collection because it can take up to 10 minutes to edit a single learners record. Slow and badly designed. I wish I could be more positive about Progresso.....

I have been using it since last September, after 5 years in a SIMS school. I was excited to learn a new MIS, but that excitement has diminished quite considerably. To be fair, our school suffered from a bad implementation (migration from CMIS) about 3-4 years ago and that was down to the previous data manager in a large part. The teaching staff here still call it 'Depresso' as a hangover from the term when it was basically unusable. I have also had a lot of help from the Advanced Support Team, as a new user, and their helpdesk has dramatically improved since September, where they were suffering from their move from Derby to Birmingham, losing many of their experienced support staff in the process. My main issue is how slow the damn package is. SIMS, even hosted on a County site, was instantaneous. The lag between screens drives me insane. I often have Progresso open on two different browsers at the same time, doing two different jobs, so I am not just sitting there watching the 'blue wheel of despair' turning. And before anyone says it, it is not our internet connection, I experience the same issues when working from home on a high speed fibre optic connection, and our IT department has done a full analysis on this. Advanced are working on this issue and are just about to move from fewer large servers to more and smaller servers. I wait with baited breath, and fingers crossed. In particular the Report Server causes the most problems, and many functions in Progresso rely on this. Assessment report data regularly take 4 hours to cross to the Report Server, timetables take an age to produce (even a single timetable for 1 student takes around 5 minutes), and our Attendance Officer takes hours to produce letters to parents which would have taken minutes in SIMS. Cover is also a huge problem, as the pages don't load or refresh or just plain crash and our Cover Supervisor is fed up and threatening to look for another job since she can't do hers properly here. Report creation in SIMS was basic, quick and intuitive. You need 4 days of training to run SRSS Report Builder to use with Progresso. Markbooks are just rubbish and we are about to buy in a different package to compensate for this (to be fair my last school did this too as we didn't particularly like SIMS Assessment Manager either). Don't even think about using Progresso to do ad-hoc room bookings, it is a nightmare. I have a huge list of problems I have been documenting since about December, so I could go on.... I think Progresso could be an amazing product, but it is unfinished. The menu structure alone demonstrates this, and it is not intuitive. Advanced is the third company to own Progresso since my school bought it, and the indications are that they are putting the investment in to improve it. But I'd give it a year or three before even looking at it.

Thank-you for this, I believe this assumption came from the Advanced consultant and no-one has queried it yet, so now I know it might be possible I will investigate and see if I can get that to work. At the moment I am pulling data out of about only 4-5 of the columns in the markbook assessments, so I would need the ability to pick and choose which need to be included in the report template. I hope that is possible.

Oooh, thank-you, that is very useful!

Hi Marcus - already got a quote from you on Friday! A

OK, so we are a huge school with many, many rooms. We don't let our departmental administrators have access to Manual Event Override, so adhoc room bookings are done on Outlook, but they have to look up on Progresso first and then the free rooms report is just unmanageable for a quick look, as one period can overlap a screen and when you drop down you lose sight of the column headings, so you have to memorise them.....and if you export to excel there are loads of extra columns and the period 'marker' is one big merged column which overlaps several pages and makes it hard to navigate. There is a lot of back and forth to check individual room timetables at the moment, a job that should take less than a minute is taking tens of minutes... Maybe once I can use SRSS I can design a better report? But there is no visual view. The room booking system I used at my last school, I could select a bunch of classrooms, and it would easily display who was in what classroom and which periods were bookable, all in bright pretty colours that our teachers could use as well as admin staff. Advanced themselves say they don't have a built-in room booking module, so I really think that is something we are going to have to buy in.

My next question - Next term I will be taking over Assessment, as this is still in the hands of a senior leader who simply did not have time to train me on it this term. Is there anyone here who uses markbooks? Because nobody I have spoken to yet does. This school paid for a consultant from Advanced to create markbooks for one of our departments to be used as a test-bed, so then we can hopefully get all the departments using them and have all the data in one place. My last school used Go4Schools, which I really liked, and Progresso should in theory be able to do everything that this program can, or so I'm told. BUT the consultant himself said markbooks were not up to scratch and he created everything as assessments instead. And of course assessment screens can't be fed into reports, so I have to export all the relevant data from the markbook assessments and upload them into the report assessments. And as I can't sort the assessments into categories, we now have tons of assessments clogging up the assessment screen views and we have to go hunting for the report assessments - now ok I can do something about that by being stricter about the naming of each as the markbook assessments all seem to have different names.... But why are markbooks not fit for purpose in the first place? I haven't had time to play with one yet, that's my Christmas holiday job, so I'd appreciate any insights. Thank-you.

I really have given it a good go, with the view that it is a different beast and I just had to get used to it. But there are definitely things that make me extremely frustrated. I can do you a full list if you want. But there are a lot of stupid little things that annoy me, such as why every drop-down list is different (by surname, by surname with checkbox, so you can't jump ahead to the appropriate letter, and my least favourite - by forename including the pupils middle name), and how the calendars start on different days of the week depending on where you are in Progresso. and why you have to save on every tab in Pupil records, then click ok, then wait for the next tab to load, and repeat. I lost several hours the other day watching the 'blue wheel of despair' going round and round as I was on a major correction-of-data exercise. I was extremely happy to have an Import Data tool, but even that has issues as it doesn't overwrite some data and manual corrections then have to be made to remove the original data. And then there are Reports, my current bug-bear. I don't know SRSS, and Advanced have cancelled the last two Level 1 and Level 2 training courses I could have reached, so I've spent a term without the ability to create custom reports. In SIMS I could build a complicated report up and have the data on my desktop in under 5 minutes, all without training as it was so intuitive. I need 4 days (!) of training courses to be able to do the same in Progresso. I am very much looking forward to the promised major over-haul, as I know they have been working hard on that, and hopefully lots of my little niggles will disappear then. Does anyone know when this is likely to happen?

Hi there djrscally, Thanks for replying. Unfortunately I am not the person doing the room bookings, and she does not have access to manual event override or Cover, although the Cover manager helps out as required. They are currently using Outlook, but have to look up rooms first in Progresso, and the Free Rooms report is just unusable. It all takes far, far too long to do. I don't think we can separate out manual event overrides just for room bookings can we, as far as user permissions go, can we? I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we don't have any choice but to look at a room booking package? To be fair to Progresso, we used one of these in my last SIMS school too....

Apols, I have posted in the MIS forum too, and got my threads mixed up!

I think it has the potential to be amazing.. maybe in 5 years? But please can you tell me - do you manage room bookings within Progresso or do you use an additional package, and if so which one? I have a rebellion going (which, you know, I'm normally in favour of) from the admin staff over how long it takes for them to assign adhoc bookings, and then these not showing up in Cover anyway! thanks.

Unfortunate that you know SIMS, or unfortunate that you now use Progresso?

Ah no, I prefer to keep my distance, you know, fly casual....