supportman

If you have teams, why are you using handsets? We just let people call from their computers these days. We tried the Yealink but they are just cheap android devices so we ditched them entirely.

No speed issues here either, its been fine. Only issue we've had is some failing payments on the Bromcom parent portal.

It's important to try out all the products and demo them to the stakeholders in your school. But, unless you are a large MAT I think its pretty easy to choose what is simply the best product for the school. We certainly found all the prices and capabilities similar, it really came down to the look and feel of the product as well as the development speed and roadmap.

Yes when we moved to Bromcom, we just sent them the our Sims SQL database and they migrated all our data within a few days. We ran it in parallel for a few months to check everything then sent them a 2nd copy of the SQL the day before official change over. Giving EES control of your database in their cloud, seems like a yet another barrier to migration.

I don't think it needs any more security than in school really, assuming there is a decent timeout on the login and have Single Sign on with Office 365 setup. Of course you can have MFA there if you want. Bromcom has both time and IP based access control per user. But we don't feel the need to use it. Not sure about Sims though, as running over a remote desktop has its own security challenges!

Definitely look into the alternatives, as the reply above states you can get huge discounts from new MIS's if you are tied to a Sims contract. An MIS move at any time should be cost neutral with the big players. I'm loving Bromcom simply being Single-Sign-on with Office 365 logins, staff just click a button and they are in. No credential problems ever.

It will never work... and anyone who thinks building a "cloud layer" over a 30 year old piece of obsolete software is a good design choice really is deluded. They had the chance to start again with a clean modern stack then migrate customers 1-by-1, but they chose to prolong the pain and trap customers into long contracts instead.

Have you all signed up for new 3 year contracts then when moving to Sims hosted?

I mean, the very fact that is uses a technology from 20 years ago tells you everything you need to know. A VPN can be very unreliable and slow. Any solution based on that is going to have issues.

Yeh we had the same nonsense views when we changed, particularly from one or two older data mangers or experienced teachers. We did it anyway and staff were absolutely fine, took them about 30mins to work it all out. It really was a non issue.

Really... if you are going to do this its worth looking at both Arbor and Bromcom. Sims hosted is a terrible solution if you compare it with modern native web MIS's The changeover is really simple and it will probably save the school money as well. Its a no brainer in my mind having done the migration a few years back.

Thought this was interesting to read about the new stuff coming. I'm looking forward to the timetable stuff personally after getting my personal wish last year of better MCAS registration processes. Bromcom Roadmap 2023 – Bromcom

Just read that Bromcom have another 50 new sites for the start of the year. Lets hope its smoother than last year with the new schools not taking up all the bandwidth

Great but sad to see the same old forum software still here for yet another year At least SSL seems to work now though

Out of interest, why are you buying a SAN? I thought they were all the rage back in the day but really designed for data center storage, not local. I would think these days a far better solution would be cloud based storage for students and staff members as well as a hosted MIS.

All the speed issues with Bromcom were fixed a while ago though. We haven't had any downtime since they found the culprit (I think a 3rd party API integration) which caused all those issues. Its been great recently

We went with Bromcom because it covered more bases (at the time). It was also a better secondary school app and Arbor was better for Primary (again at the time, not sure now). Specifically Cashless integration, Power Bi reporting and better parent and student portal apps. EDIT: Future stuff like cloud timetabling and AI integration would make me still choose bromcom today, they are great at development. Either are good at the end of the day, far superior to Sims anyway.

In microsoft teams, we just update the robot auto attendant welcome message.

So microsoft teams then We have an all students group as well as an all staff group for this. And post daily updates there and tag the year groups which sends them a notification.

Honestly forget that document... Ubiquity switches are perfect for small and large schools.

We tested various screens before settling on the Smart 6000s. Its a great screen that does everything we need.

Its a change and they seem to have a solution so I guess the charge is justified.

It is our pleasure to welcome 5 more Schools in to the Bromcom family We are happy to have you here and can’t wait to start working together - Crypt School - Langley School - Queens Park Community School - Oakfield Primary School - Marylebone Boys' School Bromcom on Twitter: It is our pleasure to welcome 5 more Schools in to the Bromcom family

We use Senso, found it far less bloated than Impero and cloud based is a bonus to run anywhere.

I asked it "How many pupils on roll" And it failed to even reply to that, not intelligent at all as far as I can see...