supportman

Yes I hear you on the parent portal onboarding. The old process was painful. So glad they fixed that, but its seamless now I think coming from Sims, we have far less daily issues than we used to. Our staff are pretty used to it and even now have some expertise in quick reports and PowerBi for the more advanced requests. Having the Wonde integration has also been brilliant talking to other systems such as Sign in system, Biostore tills or parentseveningsystem. We are an independent secondary academy so all support is done onsite. We have staff sign up to the regular webinars and coffee mornings so that useful. When we moved, loads of people were worried because Sims was the way it "was always done" but people soon started to adapt. Attendance and the teacher app were particularly large improvements from the Sims days.

Similar size school to us, it was an easy process to move. Far less issues than I had been worried about as the person in charge of the move Costs were pretty much the same if you included the 3rd party software we ditched. Room bookings is an area that Bromcom lacks, but everything else such as cashless catering, integrated comms, parent portal etc are really good. Their apps are also awesome. Overall I would say just go for it, you won't regret coming from Sims certainly. Need to obviously keep an open mind about new processes and such. Timetabling can be fun and I think Bromcom are just about to release a new web app for that, but personally we kept with our 3rd party product there so it was an easy transition. Importing to Bromcom was a few clicks anyway.

We did 5 years and I would definitely advise to not do any more. A clean database is important. Saying that, why not just create a report in Sims and export? Thats what we did with all our legacy students but have never actually used it as far as I know. It just went into an excel file for archival.

I'm shocked at that. I think I wrote in another thread recently that we got rid of at least 10 3rd party products and saved over £10,000 in the process. I realize that every school is different and has different requirements but both Arbor and Bromcom are lightyears ahead of legacy Sims. Migration and training were literally non issues for us. It was up and running in hours. I thought the same as you though before we did it, was scary but came to nothing. The training was excellent and all online. People had no issue.

At the recent Bromcom event I went to they specifically said they had a new team to work on the forgotten ideas portal. I think they said all the top ideas would essentially be fixed but don't quote me on that hehe There was a new team working on them apparently. They also mentioned ongoing work on performance as I quoted above from Fergal (he was at the event as well).

Actually Fergal just posted this on the ideas forum. Finally some response after 2 years of mentioning speed issues I believe he is the top guy as well, so hopefully they are working on this as a priority now.

I actually have lots of sympathy since Bromcom is clearly having growing pains with all the new schools joining. Seeing the incident report and knowing what the problem is now gives me much more confidence that they can fix it and will improve over time. Scaling is never easy and I've been in similar situations myself where everyone is shouting very loudly about an unplanned outage, but actually the long term fix is what's really important and powerful lessons are always learned. But as someone who runs a backend network I also know you need to plan for this type of thing 6 months or a year ahead. Getting close to capacity and still adding more customers is clearly a bad idea. Anyway, hopefully just growing pains and I look forward to a reliable and performant future. I'm just glad its your guys problem to deal with and not mine

I think its actually because Arbor pick up more primary and Bromcom more secondary schools but they are both good products. Certainly when we quoted both companies the prices were not massively different so it came down to which MIS was best.

United Learning loses High Court battle over £2m MIS deal (schoolsweek.co.uk)

The main difference is 4matrix is a load of curated reports that are pre built. In Bromcom and PowerBi you would have to build them yourself. But its very powerful. No complaints here. Important to also say 4matrix works with Bromcom and Arbor now I believe, so maybe keep it if they are that reliant on it...?

We dropped: 4Matrix Schools Cash Office Cunninghams (but went to biostore) Locker Bluesky TASC insight Groupcall Messenger Room Booking System Saved us about 10k a year from memory! We kept parents evenings bookings due to its remote capability and evolve for trips management. Wish we had kept roombookingstems as well, as the Bromcom feature is rubbish compared. But I don't think they have a direct link yet.

We did it a few years back, was a good exercise if you involve people higher up. I found it genuinely useful to get things upgraded and helped prioritize cyber security in the school.

Sounds actually like they are trying to improve performance and that is what has caused the issues. Perhaps some kinds of backend upgrade that went wrong. Looking forward to reading the in depth analysis anyway. That's a good move at least. As a network manager I can relate to that!

Seems fixed now. 1hr 20mins downtime. ouch! Always feels worse when its in the morning.

Resolved by rebooting the server....?

Seems fast again now. Seems to indicate a database server overloaded perhaps?

EVERY Monday morning. Its almost a pattern! 24 seconds to load the login page here... :/

I had hive in my last place, worked well and adjusted the temperature with a simple schedule. Interestingly I just moved back into a flat with electric only heating and its really cheap compared. I think the main reason is the lack of a standing charge for Gas since they went up so much it makes a big difference.

Any breakdown of what the actual issue is? It would be useful to be transparent if for example you are overloaded with new customers like it has been speculated.

Yes just get the numbers from Gamma, I'd personally wait though if you use a 3rd party to buy them would be best to get them to do it all.

We got a company to do it, but its pretty easy. It didn't cost much, just a days consultancy and all remote. MS Teams Phones | Design and Management Systems Ltd | DMS (dmsystem.co.uk)

Extremely quick and responsive now for me. I wonder if they changed the server VM or something....

Yep slow here again as well :/

No issues for me currently, Bromcom seems fast.

We use smartboard 6000s in all our classrooms now, I like them.