supportman

And again.....

Not sure how they can be "unaware" when hundreds of schools would have asked for their SQL data from the hosted solution during migration.

That's quite clever. Out of interest how do you make up the teacher 4 digit code?

We've always used the staff initials as our staff codes which are 2 or 3 letters such as AF or GFC. We did the same in Sims and then Bromcom, but as our staff increase a simple 3 letter maximum string is bringing up some dupes. What does everyone else use as the unique staff code in Bromcom?

We just allow staff to have it on their personal smartphones. Seems to work in downtime situations but its very rare and really if the MIS is down for an hour, we just fill in attendance data after it comes back.

We use the bromcom supplied SMTP credits. No real reason not to as far as I know its very cheap.

Nice to finally see a public video of the new timetabling features. I just sent to our timetabler and he said it looked good, but didn't show much about scheduling. Would be great to get a more in depth look uploaded. You should upload demos to YouTube, it would really help being able to share to people and new customers. As well as being good for training.

Moved from Sims to Bromcom just after the pandemic when it became clear that cloud was the way to go. Good migration (took a day) and excellent training from someone who was used to questions about Sims. No real issues in the first week, teachers simply adapted and it was easy due to it being a simple web system. Overall system is good and progress has been rapid over recent years further extending their lead over Sims. Best bits are the integrated cashless payment system, parent app, reporting into excel and power bi. Things that need improvement include the Room and equipment booking features, iPad support for apps, timetabling and a few other bits. Feature requests and support have been very slow in recent years, but I think that is because of the growing pains and too many schools joining. Recent speed has seen some good improvements and also reliability has been good since they started scaling servers properly. The road was a little bumpy before that. I simply don't understand why anyone is still using Sims or hoping they can migrate to Next Gen, its really just stuck with their technical debt.

No we've never done that, our students are pretty self sufficient. EDIT: But we moved to manual exactly for the 2 year subject reason.

We found it easier just to allow staff to create teams for their classes without SDS. Just gives them more responsibility. We do enforce naming conventions though.

Looks like a very powerful little machine in a nice form factor. Very much like the Apple Mac mini I guess.

We use paxton and its pretty automated with salamandersoft integration.

I think it will provide great competition for Intel. But arm in my opinion suits mobile devices rather than desktops really. Will be interesting to see how it goes. The fight is on

Yeh I don't think these are designed for gaming at all.

Crazy to think it has 40% my battery life than intel in video playback tests!

Can't wait for these. It's about time Microsoft caught up with Apple M chips. I'll be interested in how the graphics perform. Intel really did mess up by slowing down their research and development some years back now. Releasing 5% improvements and re-branded chips for years and years. They deserve everything they get in terms of competition. I have little care for the AI nonsense, but better battery life would be huge for my workload.

We are also getting this a lot. Actually quite nice to see people reduce their storage.

@mthomas08 said it above. We've also had no speed issues in recent months. Its been very responsive. I wonder if you are still on the old slow hosted servers and perhaps some users have been migrated to the saleable hosts perhaps? Just guessing... Reports are not the fastest but that's the same for all MIS's generally. More to do with amount of data and report design rather than server power I would think.

Appears to be all fixed and super fast again Like others have said, its been great the last 4 months. Seems like it was a scaling issue at Azure this time.

Seems slow and overloaded, strange as its been really fast and responsive recently.

We just confirmed all parents, student and staff details were correct. That was enough really. Valid parents emails is an important one as they are used by MCAS for the parent portal. You end up making reports in a different way and using inbuilt features a lot with Bromcom so its quite different (and better) than Sims. For that reason you don't really need to sanitize too many things outside the core data. You also get a practice Database for a couple of weeks to look at. This helped us a lot with confidence that we had our data migrated acurately.

Yep even made it to the GOV.uk website. Its about time as well. Education software firm probed over potential abuse of dominance - GOV.UK (http://www.gov.uk)

Last I heard Sims was using some outdated Microsoft SQL servers and Delphi databases. I really do think their technical debt is the issue as they simply did not upgrade it over 20 years. If they had kept up with modern technology the transition would have been simple. Instead they outsourced to India and milked the legacy system for all its worth. Using every trick in the book to tie in customers and stop people migrating away.

This is great stuff, thanks for the links. I'd been trying to work out DKIM for a while.