supportman

Is that Fusion online?

Why even run servers? Most of our services are SASS now and you can use Azure to run authentication these days. So no real need for onsite servers migrated to the cloud.

One of the last services we want to get rid of is our onsite cashless catering, currently with Iris BioStore. I've just been on a webinar about Biostores new cloud offering and wasn't too impressed, it looked like a 1990's windows app and used QR codes. I see Civica also have a cloud cashless system now, not seen it yet though. Has anyone else looked into this?

Good choice, it works very well and doesn't cost much. Well worth it in my opinion.

I've said it many times before, but yes building an MIS is not actually that hard using a modern framework like Ruby on Rails or Laravel. I've got the skills as well but we use Bromcom now and pretty happy with that. 80% of it I would build in exactly the same way as Bromcom The vast majority of development for the big companies is technical baggage, which is why they find it so hard. Writing a student module would be the first step, then registers the next then census stuff. Make this site responsive with something like tailwind from the beginning and you already have better features than most MIS's out there. Both Sims and Bromcom are stuck on .net (not sure about arbor) but modern frameworks can make this kind of thing very quick to build. But saying that, there is a huge market for a cloud based cashless catering system out there waiting to be tapped. I'd definitely look there first as its not really hard to take payments or keep a database of a couple of thousand people!

Well I was hoping someone would have setup a wireless recently using the latest technologies that have reduced the need for old style certificates or keys. Was hoping for something distributed via Active directory to our domain machines. We've used a NPS radius server for years but it seems a rather traditional way of doing things. Clearly the tech hasn't moved on as much as I hoped I see WPA3 has been released and is available on the unify backend, but it doesn't seem to work with Wi-Fi 7 6ghz band and still doesn't really solve the problem of keys leaking from devices.

Has anyone got some instructions on setting up modern authentication on Unify Wi-fi then? We already have a radius server for our BYOD network but I am looking for a device based soluition rather than user based. Seems a lot of people have different opinions on this! Was just wondering how you all did it

Good morning, How does everyone authenticate on their main school Wi-fi? We've always used a WPA2 Enterprise key as well as MAC address filtering, But with the rise of private Wi-Fi addresses on various devices it sounds like that is a no go for the future. I'm just installing a new Unify Wi-Fi 7 setup, so looking at the best way to distribute and setup a new Wifi SSID. Ideally it would come from Active Directory or be able to be silently rolled out. How do you do it?

Just checked out PDQ deploy package, it should work fine with /s Notepad++_64bit_8.7.exe /S

The group policy specifically says that it will ask you options when you first use it, so I don't think its possible to skip them.

Pretty much the same with Bromcom, never noticed any "system overload" type behaviors like we did with Sims. Our census is almost transparent now and very easy to do Some parts of the system are slower, such as complicated reports and the attendance pages but I think that's more to do with the view layout than anything else.

Yes, we had them in during our procurement process even though we already had Sims. It was a useful baseline. Their presentation was quite ridiculous, they had no real plan for the future at that time and kept on telling us about their "cloud" offering which turned out to be running a 20 year old software stack on a remote server. Even the non technical people in our school clocked it very early on that there were issues with their development processes and roadmap. This was during the time when Capita were trying to sell the company, but I believe its not much different to this day! It was a close run thing between Arbor and Bromcom. Both were excellent and entirely modern. In the end it came down to small factors like integrated payments from the parent portal and look of the system. Proper procurement and a fair process to all suppliers is essential to get the best system for your school. Whatever that system is....

Don't agree with that at all. We had far more downtime from Capita Sims with "update patches" than any cloud SASS service downtime. I'm so much happier knowing someone else is panicking when a service doesn't run The most important thing in any downtime incident is the company learns the lessons and makes sure it doesn't happen again.

We have a simple script that logs to a text file each time a machine is logged on. Provides some nice data as well as a history of who used which machine. EDIT: Don't think PDQ Inventory can do total logins as far as I can tell...

Here you go Major Incident Root-Cause-Analysis 2nd-5th September 2024.pdf

Yeh can't disagree with that, I just want people to be informed as many schools are looking at the MIS change. Its far too easy to just put Arbor, Bromcom and Sims into certain boxes. That's an over generalisation. People should test out all the MIS's and make informed decisions based on how good the system is as well as price. The best thing that can happen is there is a fair and open competition which drives innovation and prices downwards.

3rd September I believe. There was an issue with the Azure capacity increase that has been resolved.

Its been fine though recently.... They even wrote an incident report about what went wrong and how it was fixed.

The funniest thing is Bromcom probably IS the best MIS out there 😂. Its certainly the most fully featured anyway. But your right, all these statements from Bromcom trying to make the points (which are actually fair) are just not communicated very well. I guess its better than EES Sims who just do remain silent so we can make fun of them and their 40 million pounds investments and Next generation timelines

Anyone staying with this company are basically supporting their business practices.... I think that says a lot. Is there any progress on their 40 million investment and new "next gen" MIS yet? I mean I'm all for fair competition if they have a good product.

Confirmed display bug, I needed to click the next tab then back to show anything.

We use moorpay here, that's all I know though and not sure how or if it integrates into Bromcom. Seems pretty independent.

I've been looking into this for something like this as a backup for our BT fibre and struggling to find a provider to install the cabling and router. Do you offer a stand alone service or know of any company that does? We don't mind installing it ourselves but finding the right hardware is proving difficult. Only thing I've found so far are for campervans like the 5G now or Maxview companies.

Yep we have it and their cloud version does the job for us! Although saying that, I think Sharepoint would do just as good a job these days

We use PDQ deploy here, works pretty well and is quite cheap for education. Connect is more expensive but pretty cool.