supportman

Actually really good news, and about time they merged them!

Design and Management Systems Ltd | Home | DMS (dmsystem.co.uk) Were very helpful with us and have migrated a number of schools I believe.

Yeh we left Sims client on the machines, it only takes up a few megabytes.

Yep we did as well. Awful things...

Fantastic result. IT guys to the rescue! That's actually quite a good solution.

Does this mean your school has no backups of Sims...? That's pretty shocking if its true... You don't need the password, if you do have the backups. Those should be in the form of a BAK or SQL file on the Sims server.

They have issues with dates and new staff joining on our system. Something to do with the sql backend. We've never solved it but a reboot usually fixes it and a SQL command.

We moved to Biostore with Bromcom payments from MCAS. Works really well and not had any issues with it. Biostore is quite old software though, their sync isn't the best.

Just noticed its now 5 years since this thread was made. FIVE YEARS!!

Not safe....LOL! Yet as someone who has been through the process, submitted my SQL file and had a new MIS working in less than 36hrs it all worked fine.... Sounds to me they are in absolute panic mode about customers leaving them.

Very fast here, menus loading almost instantly. Much improved.

Not sure if any changes recently, but Bromcom feels very responsive this morning!

Does it work with Office 365 single sign on for teachers? Is it price competitive with Senso? I know senso is pretty cheap so wanted to ask.

What licensing did you buy to make this work?

Yeh used to be Capita Sims only, they kept on renewing it every couple of years. That means this is a really big shift. Northern Irish Education Authority extends schools IT contract with Capita | Capita Capita announces two-year, £50.6m extension to IT service contract | Capita

Yep big win. Should shift the MIS charts as well. Bromcom to supply MIS software to Schools in Northern Ireland – WhichMIS?

Yes your correct, so its more like 7 + 5 years of data Nobody needs more than that on a live system. We just archived the old student data into an excel report. We also archived all the old Sims linked documents into a SharePoint backup. Not looked at them since!

Well you would hope so, I think someone else mentioned NI will be on separate infrastructure so it shouldn't have any effect in theory.

If you have Veeam you can live restore them to the backup server then upgrade the host. Would go with 2022 though for longer support.

I've never used the broadcast feature but for simple screen monitoring it seems to work as expected. We use it in all our IT classrooms

Out of interest, why use Parent Pay at all? We changed to the bromcom payment feature in the parent portal and it works great! All integrated into the app as well. Saved us a lot of issues I think...

That's useful to see the notes. We did a similar exercise when all the salespeople came in. We have a 2 week dual split timetable here and have no issues with it as far as I know. We do use Keith Johnsons timetabler though and not the bromcom software to create the timetable. We take registers on iPads and web every lesson and don't have an problems there. Never paid anything extra for storage. But we did buy some SMS and SMTP credits at some point i think. That was the only additional charge. I do agree that those could have been included in the base cost.

I think your confusing us being frustrated with a major recent 90min downtime at a peak registration time, with being super slow all the time:) Its fine 99% of the time and our staff have no issues. Sure it could be quicker in some places, but that's me talking as a web developer and network manager myself. If you check my posts, I'm also very complimentary about Arbor as well. At the end of the day, all these issues are coming up because both Arbor and Bromcom have brought on loads of new customers. Its a sign of their success I guess.

I would suggest you look again and do a comparison with things like 3rd party tools included. It was clear as day how bad Sims was when we looked at things like parent portals, student portals, comms links, cashless catering, trips, HR modules etc. Sims just didn't have some of them or was very bad at them. I also find it hard to believe any school thinks Sims is a good fit in the year 2024

Their managing director has an account on this forum but he's not been seen in a while. But I'm guessing its simply a sign of their success as so many schools are moving. Not really an excuse though, they should hire more people