DODICT

In principle I don't think its a bad thing - subsidised pricing for the school if they choose. I personally would prefer to not mix advertising with parent communication but there's lots of examples where schools choose to make commercial agreements to save money. I.e. preferred supplier for uniform.

Dont get all excited about GDPR ! I'm pretty sure they're generic commercial advertising not for bromcoms products.

there's different purchasing options for the app and you can have them removed if your on the right package. HAve you discussed options with Bromcom ?

Other MIS products have natural language querying - so using OS speech to speech this is possible now . . . I'm not convinced its killer functionality just leveraging tech that is readily available but we came up with a few examples where it might be useful and takes away some barriers to getting raw data on screen easily.

think your getting it wrong personally - the power of your MIS is what you can get out and by augmenting the front end you arent sorting the fundamental issue of SIMS. So if input is your issue fine but its not just the interface of SIMS thats broken so I'd question the quality and timeliness of the information you're getting out. I'd love to spend a day looking at what you use information for as a school and I'd be able to show you how other systems would help you be more efficient and more effective by timely use of the information you have. I've seen that in two trusts I've worked for now and its galling that even in successful outstanding schools the inefficiencies created by using SIMS. I see it time and time again and its fear of change that make people think changing will be really problematic - any transition period will last weeks, if that from my experience, which is preferable to perpetually sticking with a flawed dated solution. Its not just the reporting overview that makes MATs change its often personnel - they have someone with seniority and expertise in the area of data that when tasked with leading the provision of intelligence and information across multiple sites quickly demand (need) better than SIMS. I can see that where there isn't that insight and understanding in a school there is no catalyst for change but from a school perspective thats a problem too. The time I can save 100's of staff on a daily basis covers makes it pretty easy to justify my salary and I do ok ! So schools need to recognise the skills needed to run a modern school are changing and they might not exist in their SLT but to get the best VFM and be most effective they need the right people leading the right systems. So yes we are in a period of change but please dont think that their aren't viable alternatives out there right now as there are. I've said it before and I'll say it again - I'd be happy I could make any school better off within 12 months by migrating away from SIMS both financially and in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Schools work in making improvements year on year by their nature so I think its strange a , often inflated, fear of the possibility of issues associated with change stops many schools making a change that can deliver benefits within 12 months. But hey it earns me a decent living and provides ample opportunity to make an impact so maybe I should be happy with the current situation ?

definitely possible with SSRS - apologies I thought ISAMS provided SSRS reporting for all but if the school arent using it then its probably going to be a big jump . . .

Trust me there are several better products than SIMS in the market already in my opinion, from both a user perspective and at an executive and strategic level. And the market wont change significantly while people pay extra to replace the flawed and limited functionality of SIMS ! And the areas you mentioned are definitely covered in other products and for me would be infinitely better in a native cloud based MIS. Be part of the solution, not the problem

BROMCOM. The key for me is ease and accessibility for staff at the front end but with a powerful and flexible reporting engine(s) at the back. THis means as a trust we can provide exactly what we want, how we want it, to the numerous stakeholders across our organisation. I'm confident I can provide live summary dashboards of key metrics for leaders of the trust right down to the detail of a individual report for a child, with a couple of clicks, directly out of my MIS. It will take some time to develop all our desired outputs but crucially I know I have functionality there to allow it.

I mean its not a good sign when they cant deliver on their promises to develop a modern, fit for purpose MIS - so why continue with a company and product that from my perspective arent delivering and haven't done for some a good while ? And in my mind when their current product is so woefully behind the market I do think its a little optimistic to expect the same company to suddenly produce something that is market leading all of a sudden ?!

Why looking at solutions on top of SIMS ?! If thats flawed surely its not the best long term solution practically or financially to bolt on products trying to replace all of the day to day uses of an MIS. If your MIS is that broken should you not be looking at a new MIS ?

@vikpaw with SSRS if you export your docs to excel you can get a tab per student - a super free tool called ASAP tools (Essentially resource for any data role in schools) can then output each tab to a file and even picks up the tab name which you can define in SSRS. This is how we managed to get our MFDs to booklet and staple reports as it needed them to be separate docs.

But I'll add I like the direction they are travelling and think they'll get there but just not quite there yet for me and for the needs of a growing multi phase MAT (the context I was looking at it) in my eyes. But I'm pretty confident in my context it still would have represented a significant step forward for our schools currently using SIMS and Facility but I felt there was a better option for our needs.

Jesus, to make the conscious decision to go back to SIMS is damning. That said does the MAT not want consistency in the MIS its schools are using ? And I'd be surprised if when looking at the market SIMS comes out as a product that any MAT would want to consolidate its usage on. that said I know many schools that use their MIS poorly and an incoming principal etc then makes a snap decision to go to SIMS as its what they know without actually reviewing the market or considering their needs. Reporting was key for me when looking at Arbor - was a little light on getting info out. Yeah their dashboards look great for the statutory data but each school's assessment is very different and when you cant report as you would like on one of your key metrics it fell short for me. Yes there are ways but I found other products to more readily support getting 'what we want, how we want it' than Arbor. I also heard when looking closly at some of the nitty gritty processes the functionality wasn't as user friendly and efficient as others - Talk to me about school improvement sure but an exams officer has a job to do and our MIS needs to support that process. So I'd definitely ensure you delve into the specifics of some of the back office functions with the appropriate colleagues to ensure its not going to be a hindrance.

Any reason you excluded Civica Corero/resource ? they do have a true cloud offering freshly available ?

can this not be achieved using the advanced report writer - ? I dont miss much about progresso but its SSRS integration meant you could always get what you wanted on a page pretty much as you wanted it. When I had a good look at the advanced reporting tool I felt it could do most of what SSRS could . . There is also a nice tool called ASAP tools that easily creates a file per tab in excel - I often find you MS exports also allow you to export to excel and get a tab per entity and with ASAP tools your then a click away from splitting that document up. I'll be migrating two schools to BROMCOM soon so interested if this 'hack' is essential. thanks.

I'd question why you would need to retain aged datasets - you exam cohorts and results will be available on perf tables or ASP etc etc.

Inexpensive ? Relatively it will be, I’ve never seen a school ditch sims and not save money. False economy if your working round a fundamental issue of poor reporting then solve the route cause. If you did a market review today they wouldn’t be in the frame so why stick with them ? Habit ? Ignorance ? False hope of improvement ? Familiarity ? I’ll say with confidence any school Ive worked with could be better off financially, operationally and strategically within 12 months.

Sorry but not really integrating with it at all. laughable. If you can utilize the power that enterprise grade business intelligence can offer surely you would have the intelligence to choose an MIS that actually supports it and is directly accessible from the platform ?

Trust me using say SISRA will be a million times easier than getting analysis out of SIMS. If your an excel wiz you can dump it into excel from SIMS but if you want to distribute it to an audience wider than yourself then I really suggest SISRA or 4 matrix as has already said it will pay for itself in your time alone.

Capita dont make money from allowing the community to plug the gaps in their software. They make a tidy penny for little effort through their partnership programme. Their current position is counter intuitive - they have a crap product with the 1001 gaps being plugged by loads of add ons they make money on. They know a significant release will trigger a lot of tendors which will result in loss of customers. And if they made it more flexible and open to access they would also lose out on the all the partnership deals. Its not a recipe for long term success but its maximizing income in the present.

why not just get a decent MIS that natively supports you doing this and actively encourages it as recognises your needs ? If SIMS was easy to deploy, maintain and support and was competitively priced I'd understand the desire to 'make it work' but it isnt.

"links to dashboard software such as Microsoft Power BI are talked about " - laughable that linking to a decent reporting tool is "being talked about" when they are meant to be developing a fit for purpose modern MIS from scratch. They really are clueless are cant be honest about the flaws in the current product so you cant expect them to produce something better when they have another bash. THey just dont get the modern requirements of an MIS - that is actionable intelligence straight from your MIS. Wish they would go bust - the education sector would be better off within 12 months on many levels.

Please do a market review and recognise SIMS for what it is, an outdated horror of a product. Capita know it but after stagnating for decades they are obviously struggling to get moving again and produce SIMS 8. But you're crazy if you pick up the corpse of the product that is SIMS and then get someone to host it for you and think that is a wise move.

I'm sure you can embed credentials into the msi or something when you deploy so the updates can be ran by users. I've never had a prob with users applying the updates when properly set up ? And means its a transparent process to IT and data teams can get their updates as soon as their available. Been a while since I did it though . . .

They could ! as the CTF issue is updating contacts for erroneous students even if these students have stayed put. Other students CTF files being imported could have corrupted the outgoing year 6's even if they have been there for 6+ years. Has Capita's comprehensive explanation of the issues and risks not made it clear to everyone yet ? ? !