supportman

Performance has been good all start of term. Credit where its due! 👍 100% of parents signed up on MCAS within 48hrs as well. New record here!

We do this for our 6th form and it works great. Not sure there is a need for lower years though.

I believe LGFL, SchoolsBroadband and Clarus Networks can give quotes.

Has anyone found a reseller who can invoice for starlink? We are just setting up our backup line now but they want a credit card on the main site.

Yeh its the same in my daughters school where I am governor. They think Sims "does the job" but have never looked at another MIS and always talk about training or effort to move as blockers. They spend thousands on 3rd party products just to make up for the missing pieces and also spend extra having Sims "hosted" in some datacenter using the old .net technology. In my opinion its just a closed minded approach where they have not explored what's really out there. Its really strange to see it from the outside, but its still not my job to push it and I guess if it works for them then fine. Frustrating though as I want the best for the school and my daughter.

Training was a non issue for us, we just rolled it out at the start of a term with a simple "How to do registers" guide and that was it. The rest was very self explanitory. One thing we did find was things like Census, Admissions, reporting just worked with Bromcom. It needed no training and the user just clicked the button to do it. I remember spending hours on Sims trying to fix census issues or CTF imports. It really was quite a revelation. I think cleaning the data before migration also helped a lot as well though.

We're just moving away from sage finally after waiting for what seems like ever for their cloud platform. Its still woefully inadequate and our Finance manager has finally lost patience with them. I've been advocating a move for 5+ years. Luckily we are finally on our way. I don't understand anyone keeping Sims, other systems are so much better.

With Bromcom 7 years now, happy with Bromcom (when it works 🤣). Heard this morning that they are finally updating their hosting to fix the recent incidents.

We just used the Salamandersoft to extract all the linked documents and sent those for any Subject Access requests.

Just wanted to say thanks for this recommendation! We had Vericool installed last week and its been fantastic. We moved away from Biostore Fastrack due to their poor support and aging tills that were expensive to replace. Vericool (swiftQ) has been brilliant so far, much more responsive. Fully web based (we got rid of our local cashless server), support is amazingly responsive and install was a joy. We can even use contactless debit cards at the till now as well as thumb prints and its integrates with Bromcom payments. Overall its a great system and I recommend it to everyone.

I'd recommend moving to cloud printing as well. We moved to Kyocera cloud print last year and its been marvelous. Just requires a small client app on the endpoints and has SSO so works very well. Basically no more print server!

Is anyone using the oData feed from Bromcom and looked at permissions? Is there any way to lock down access so staff cannot see personnel data?

Brilliant explanation from the CTO. I love that he actually addresses the technical debt issue that basically killed Sims over time. CTO's need to be brave and sometimes rewrite stuff that doesn't actually affect end users or bring new features. Anyway, good to hear the explanation in clear terms.

Would love to get some links for those cables.

Interesting they included teams. The installers for that are a mess so maybe a good thing!

So after much testing and different direct cables, docks and laptops in classrooms I can pretty much say USB-C doesnt work reliably. I think its the cable lengths really, many of ours are 5 or even 10 metre runs. Also we found the cables are broken easily on the laptop ports and actual cables. We've gone back to HDMI for now.

I was also pretty shocked at that announcement. Makes them sound really amateur when image caching issues are blamed. I mean that's basic website stuff. The whole system needs to be split up and streamlined. Their product is amazing, but its clearly not scaling well.

Bit of a weird one but one of our users has accidently clicked "ignore" on a member of staffs email which sends it and future emails into the deleted items. We've found the issue and simply want to revert it. But each time we click right click on that person and "Stop ignoring" it works for a while, but then comes back the next time the user logs on. So essentially we don't seem to be able to stop these emails from being ignored! Anyone ever had this or know of a solution?

There were _MANY_ times when Sims had similar performance issues. In fact I remember distinctly when they did a main update and crashed everyone's client due to their new homepage. and don't even get me onto the absolute mess of Solus 😂 Yes bromcom being down for 30mins 3 days in a row is annoying, but lets not sugar coat the years of pain with Sims

Tempted to apply for a job there haha. I saw they were looking for infrastructure engineers recently. Seems they are wedded to Microsoft Azure though which can be a pain for things like this. I already run a high capacity API and can see the problems with Bromcom from a mile off: - 3rd party catering providers should be accessing a replica DB API. - Scaling servers is important, but if they cant scale quick enough then you need to over provision. - Split the services up into defined availability centers. Registration would be my number one target to isolate to guarantee performance. - Seems like a lot of technical debt and bloat over time to me, Go back to basics and spend 6 months on a performance sprint company wide. - Increase internal real time monitoring. I've been using Releem recently and its been amazing to see database metrics and use AI to fix slow queries. Also finally if Azure isn't working for you then run your own infrastructure. There is a great article on how basecamp saved millions by doing exactly that.

Uh oh

It is preferable NOT to try and migrate them since Bromcom works very differently and Doesn't need attachments or linked documents as its all inbuilt in the MIS. We exported with Salamandersoft and put into a SharePoint folder. The tool was free at the time we did it. Saying that, nobody has ever looked at the data I think 😂

Very fast for us this morning, hopefully whatever they did last night worked!

Really annoying, but to be fair... Bromcoms room booking is much better now it supports periods and notifications.

We started like that an no real problems, only issue was the cost which was about 4k when quoted from EES for NovaT6 on its own. We eventually moved away to Keith Johnsons product and then to the Bromcom cloud native timetabler this year.