DODICT

Class charts is decent enough product but generally dont see the value add if you have a half decent cloud mis ? Especially when you look at the automations and escalations you can build in Bromcom it generally allows you to get a lot more from your behaviour data with less effort ? Is there a two way sync with Bromcom as if not I'd really suggest silo'ing off your behaviour data from attendance, attainment etc is overall a worse situation to be in. What is it you like about CC that you cant get directly within your MIS ? I have see lots of people move away from CC and despite liking it having their data consolidated in the MIS was the overall better scenario and provides a rationalised experience for both staff and parents etc. Its generally well liked but increasingly most use cases can be served in the MIS and so the VFM argument is a tough one when considering the big picture.

You do really need to be considering your solution - its not up to par and now delivered via a far from ideal solution. Do you hear the odd story about x and y element being preferred in SIMS ? Yes. But do you ever hear of anybody wanting to move back as they are not better off as an organisation as a result of moving to a modern cloud based MIS ? No. And delivering some very simple cloud elements as a bolt ons that then need to be synced to legacy products is about the last thing I would ever want to be using in a live scenario. If I was a decision maker I would also worry what damage this is doing to my career as sticking with something that has been superseded by solutions that overall positively impact an organisation isn't a good look and skills wise the market is wanting expertise in other systems.

Schools ICT as above are the one that comes to mind immediately but have seen others. They are part of quite large group of ICT/MIS support companies now and the feedback I get is generally very positive.

there are quite a few companies offering this as a service now so well worth looking at those too as you would then have a little more resilience as well as they commonly have a pool of remote DMs. a remote DM widens your talent pool but doesnt remove that single point of failure.

The good thing is when you fail to respect your customers and clearly don't understand your customers, then you will lose those customers. I think the currrent market movement is a wonderful example of cause and effect.

As I said the connector can be accessed via Excel and then with very little time or effort from that point in terms of accessing the data even if you wanted to stick with excel as the reporting tool its worth a look. Over time its going to offer value to support your efforts.

Could you not just use the BI connector directly into Excel and use power query - the connector is an extra cost but a scalable and efficient means to access any data you want from that point. The user experience would be better to replace Excel with Power BI but appreciate that potentially has licensing implications but I think thats prob the tool I would be looking at longer term if you wanting to provide self sufficient interactive analysis to teachers etc.

Biometric login is imminent I hear - next month is likely. Pin every time is a bit laborious so should solve that.

There is a good summary here too - https://bringmoredata.blogspot.com/ - neither of these sources break by Facility and Progresso though right ? If you request the version number in the FOI you can distinguish as progresso is in the version number. There is a request on Whatdotheyknow from Summer census with this info in.

From summer census (they lost some since but not got full date for the autumn census) it was 112 on progresso, 74 on Facilitybut I'm still hearing mixed stories on if Facility (CMIS) is also being EOL but presumably they have a little more grace up to Autumn census if needed but for Cloud school users thats not available from the 01/09.

Any news if this will extend to CMIS/Facility schools too ?

pretty sure groupcall offer this service and prob cheaper than 6 weeks of temp work ...

Its for state funded schools so does that exclude academies then ?

Parent pay & sims what a combo - two outdated, relatively poor, products with significant customer bases. And the other thing in common IMHO - a poor attitude to their customers typified by responses like this - will be interesting to see if these two lumbering beasts can be turned round as there's a long way to go in terms of product and support.

easy enough to create - new table report - assessments - webmerge associations - then add the top level items as in image below. I thought they came through once set up in a template but may need an entry against them. I thought I had set up reports before all entries were complete but may not have been the case.

Wasnt communicated to me in the training and you dont seem to be doing it in your excel file Dan but you can automatch subject class teacher by simply including SubjectClassTeacher in your column label and also and this saved me a whole load of time changing to grade description rather than simply the value, again its GradeDescription simply in your label. If your tweaking the layout of a merge having to remap fields is annoying and was a year before I realised all fields could be mapped to avoid any manual matching.

Can tap into BIFFA (Experts in waste disposal) to get rid of the rubbish that is SIMS ?

yeah I get you - I import things like targets to both years to avoid having to do this but still wouldn't it expect it to die if your just running it for single year group. that said your internal firewall can have a bearing on this - depending on the timeout. I have had this before and worked fine for me at home but in school the web request was getting killed in school after a set time, anything over this time was just failing. I'd filter to just year 11 to see if that is causing an unreasonable load - worst case it would only take you an hour to whip our the forecast grades and reimport them to 11 to avoid this issue while bromcom investigate.

if you select say one pupil and run it and go to preview are you just getting the data your expecting to see in the report ? are you running it for a single year group ? why do you have year 10 & 11 on do you use both those in the report - otherwise for year 11 your pulling in a load of data you arent going to use ?

you can do this from my documents though - I've done this before. aslong as you know date /time you can narrow it down and delete them. We had errors on pupil report before but easily removed them en mass ?

you need to filter the report to only bring in the assessments required - sounds like you loading every assessment record in your database . . .

Good to hear. I'm yet to hear of someone getting to that point and not being happy that changing is absolutely the right decision. Its unfortunate that the doubters often stop the process even being started or getting to that point. Also too often get hung up on the 1 or 2 things that cant get replicated exactly and ignore the 101 things you can do better or couldn't do before . . . Best of luck with the process I'm confident you'll be in a lot better place in 12 months if you make the change if not sooner !

most offer 3 - 4 which is fine but you just need to be aware. my latest migration we didnt actually migrate any assessment data as we have it in our analysis package and just started a fresh which made setup up a lot easier and cleaner. so its well worth thinking about what you actually need dont assume you need it all especailly when in some cases it can cause added work or issues in the new MIS - and ensure you talk to your DPO as may actually be obligated to remove some info and its a good point to review.

Very much doubt they will pull in everything for all years from my experience and your obligated to keep student's educational record till their 25 and longer for SEN info etc so you'll need it available albeit not immediately after that initial phase of ensuring everything is in your new MIS and the occasional integrity check. Its nice to jump back into SIMS and other legacy apps every now and then go 'OH MY GOD' why on earth did we stick with this so long, I cant believe it just took me 25 mins to get the app launched and a simple piece of info extracted ! Especially at Primary the insights you can get (rather than simply raw data) out of the box with Arbor, in a pleasant intuitive interface is a game changer. But when the market leading 'game' hasn't moved forward in a decade it damn well should be.

sims is licensed for updates - so you can keep a version running for evermore to access archive data at no cost.