supportman

Lets just hope they can catch up Apple with its M line of chips. Windows/Intel/AMD is so far behind these days on power usage.

- What timetable features do they have and how does it work in the cloud? Tip: Timetabling can be done separately. Use whatever app you wish! - a LOT of 3rd party tools can be replaced with a good modern cloud MIS. Ask they what and do a spreadsheet of the cost reductions - Don't be afraid to ask for demo schools and go talk to them - Ask what's on their roadmap for next year and what features they developed this year - Ask them to show the mobile parent app and compare, we found this was hugely different easy of use an functionality between suppliers. Do they have core developers in house to keep it up-to-date? - Ask them to take a register to show you the workflow (hint 90% of teacher MIS usage will be taking a register so its important) - Ask them to browse their MIS on a tablet, phone, 1080p screen and 4K screen to show what's possible. - Ask to see extra things like room bookings, detention workflow, behavior points, report distributions. There are lots more but certainly the main thing is to stretch the salesmen enough to show the differences. To be honest, the top 2 MIS systems will have very little difference in functionality, its the details that count. You will immediately notice how much better they are than Sims though

Just ignore them, most organizations do these days.

Thats awesome, its no mean feat to write a timetable app! My timetabler is always moaning that things are too automated and he wants granular control. He does have a brain the size of a planet though

Bromcom are also working on a ipad specific app for MCAS as well. Another very cool improvement if they get it right as the increased screen real estate should be very useful.

Very much enjoyed the Chelsea event, although somehow I missed the mince pies?? Great to hear from Fergal about the new stuff coming in 2024. It pretty much covered all my top major gripes, specifically: MCAS iPad specific app, cloud timetabling and merge contacts. Also fantastic to hear you are working through the ideas backlog, this should have been done sooner though Lastly the efficiency and speed project sounded very promising. Thanks for listening to us customers. Since I'm here, I'd love to see improvements in Room and Equipment bookings with full calendar views and easy 1 click booking....

For anyone who is sticking with Sims long term, here is their new roadmap: SIMS NextGen - Roadmap (support-ess.com)

How's the new timetable stuff coming along?

This has to be a joke Either that or the Sims marketing department is getting pretty desperate

Bromcom has better Parent and student Portal App, cashless integration and internal reporting. It also had PowerBi integration. Bromcom has had a few performance issues this year, but that seams to have sorted itself out now. Arbor was simpler, faster to use and had a slightly better interface. Although now Bromcom has caught up with some nice UI improvements. Sims actually has a better timetable creation integration but I know Bromcom are close to releasing their new cloud timetable stuff soon so hopefully that will change. This is just my opinion, we went with Bromcom in the end and are very happy with that choice. I don't think you can go wrong with either really, its a no brainer upgrade from legacy Sims.

SIMS Next Gen: Why we chose Take Register - SIMS Next Gen (wistia.net) This video shows you everything that is wrong really with their development strategy (and a few things that are right). A pretty long presentation on how they built a (MVP) for taking registers. I mean I'm all up for analyzing data, getting feedback, and building something cool... But then they say stuff like they got feedback that they needed mobile functionality. I mean these days EVERYTHING should be built mobile first, getting feedback is good, but it seems pretty obvious to me that all devices should just work out of the box. Responsive websites have been a thing for a long time now. Then after that they start talking about working with Sims 7 and that Sims 7 is the master source of data. So actually the registers NG is "Bi-Directional synchronization". Bad idea! And after that its all about Sims hosted, Sims local, Sims NG and the differences which they need to design for. Sounds so complicated and just a terrible way to develop a product backwards.

Some new info has just come out about Sims NG. Doesn't look very exciting though, basically just a web page for taking registers.... SIMS Next Gen: what's available now - SIMS Next Gen (wistia.net)

We never had any recommendations and certainly no referral fees or benefits, We did speak to different schools around our area which was useful. I think its important to have local support in the decision which is why we excluded iSams at the time due to their lack of schools. In the end we made the decision based on actually using the demo systems.

Oh wow! We have 22 DDI's and I thought that was too many haha. Trying to get them back to using the shared phones but the convince of having a DDI integrated into their personal teams is too much for some of them

Open to students and staff without restrictions. It's well used around school as an educational and leisure tool.

Yes its been fantastic. Incredibly cheap and modern phone system integrated into teams. Has saved us over 5k a year. What's not to like really!!

Consortium to close RM-plc-Strategy-timetable-and-closure-of-the-Consortium-business.pdf (rmplc.com)

We had a similar decision although iSams was also a consideration back then as well. Price wasnt a huge decider for us as each supplier will usually match at least for the first contract. I wanted the best system. I think the thing that swung it for us was the integration with cashless catering as well as the superior MCAS parent portal app in Bromcom. I know now that arbor has caught up with the cashless stuff but I still think their parent app is lacking having seen them both side by side.

Some good advice above, definitely agree with sorting your timetable app out before moving. Staff will have no problem adjusting though. I don't think I've ever read on here any regrets about moving from Sims to one of the newer modern cloud MIS's. Sims is very outdated now.

Tempted with the Xbox series S https://www.amazon.co.uk/Xbox-RRS-00007-Series-S/dp/B08GD9MNZB Does anyone know how the performance is? I really don't want a console with a disk drive so looks like my only choice. Very good price though considering...

Yeh exactly The biggest advertisement any company can get is real world experiences of an MIS. That's why I try to post so much about it. Good and bad.

I think I've said it a few times here, but I had a specific issue with the performance on the MCAS parent portal user account page and they re-did the entire page in the last couple of weekly updates. Its now fast and much more usable with instant filters and large quick list loads (we had 3,000 parent accounts). I actually had a phone call from one of the top developers at Bromcom about it a few months before it was fixed. I just feel its growing pains really, they are taking on a lot of new customers and have struggled to scale at peak times like the start of term. The actual beauty of the cloud is you can scale resources dynamically as well as improving code, so there are 2 vectors for improvement. Although saying that, day-to-day, at least for me there has been no problem with speed in my daily usage. I certainly wouldn't call it a major issue though, 98% of the system is fine. I'm also sure Arbor is fine as well but has its pinch points, they are both excellent MIS's although we found Bromcom had many more comprehensive feature set at the time we compared.

Performance certainly needs improving as more schools join, but I don't think it's a "bad choice". Far from it. We've been very happy with Bromcom and there are always going to be vocal users who feel the worst end of the performance issues such as attendance. We have hundreds of daily users on it and i've only heard a couple of complaints about performance internally. Teachers use it daily to take registers in any lesson with no issue. The smartphone app of course helps a fair few of them as its so quick. Our admin staff also all use it daily with very few reported issues.

There are 20,000 primary schools in the UK. I would think showing off that the MIS can work in both primary as well as secondary is well worth promoting. We're a secondary and use Bromcom and it's been great.

We've found having a cloud MIS revolutionary in our school. Certainly from my point of view as the administrator there are no more updates, it just works and is always up-to-date. I don't need to do backups or pay for licenses for software or buy and upgrade new hardware. From a teachers point of view, they benefit from anywhere access, reliable updates (I'm looking at you solus!!), any device access and loads of other benefits. I still think Bromcom (and actually all cloud MIS's) have work to do on its scalability and capacity planning, as well as making the pages and core functions and reporting quicker. But it's good to see this work happening as seen by the recent improvements on the MCAS user account pages.