supportman

Just tested this for the first time and I see its improved a lot since the last time I tested, nice work. It wasn't a great "first time" experience for me though... just testing being forced to enter candidate details and getting constant popups for autosave. I get why it happens, but feels like you get stuck in a loop and unable to exit the program.

If you bank with Monzo (or many other startup fintechs) You can see that kind of info from their app automatically. Its quite cool to track the takeaways over time

Not much although I am now paying more attention to the solar panel output and smart meter! Finally I have some visibility on what we spend on electricity.

Indeed, I would recommend to anyone the bromcom payment service, as its integrated with their parent portal and apps nicely. No need for a third party payment system really but it should work if you really want to stay with parentpay. Just bear in mind they own Sims now

I'd say that was a success Did you find that the move was easier or harder than you thought? My one takeaway from our migration was that it was far less of a stress than I thought it would be when we had all the integrated systems in Sims I thought we could never leave. Turns out it was much smoother than I could ever have imagined, although of course we had small issues as well.

Anyone know any Arbour recent wins? They don't seem to publish them on their blog but I hear lots of people moving to them as well as iSams and Bromcom.

Sims? Well they can't... and won't ever be able to have a viable cloud product, without designing from the ground up. They simply have too much technical debt.

Its just remote access to Sims via the Web. No different really just a bit slower!

Our experience was pretty much send the SQL and forget. We found it very smooth. We did move over an Easter holiday though so had no issues with attedance data crossover.

Explained perfectly, although I think you mean that it does have a web notification as well Sounds like you have all basis covered! Nice work, can't wait to try it out.

I'm sure thats useful to some, but its important to ask why you needed to import linked documents migrated into a new MIS...? We just exported the old Sims documents to a file server (with the salamander tool) and left them there, sorted by admission number. If any person wanted the reports, or something else we just go there to get them. I think i've had 3 requests in 2 years for this. The reason Bromcom don't import is because its like pushing a square peg into a round hole. Bromcom doesnt need a lot of linked documents becuase it has many features inbuilt into the web UI. The whole point of it is to get away from linked documents By importing them there is a chance that people continue to use them like they did in Sims, missing out on many of the efficiencies of the new MIS.

Yeh good points. For number 2) we used parentseveningsystem which works via the parents email address in Bromcom. Its pretty much setup for 5mins and forget system and pretty seamless. Also supports online parents evenings which was why we got it in the first place.

I asked them at last years BETT show and they said they were looking at it, not sure what the current status is. But why would you want to? Just familiarity? Bromcom has all the tools Edulink has on their web portals but also with the benefit of smartphone apps which we have found are now the preferred choice for most.

Its not just the web based stuff though, they have smartphone apps for teachers, student and parents which are really good for 90% of the most basic MIS functions for each type of stakeholder. It is a big advancement from Sims.

Bromcom wins West Sussex county council. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bromcom_edtech-edchat-mis-activity-6912009237392957442-iJPq?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

Ahh yes I just mentioned this in the MIS move thread, nice big win.

Let us know how you get on. I remember the first day we moved was quite tense but ended up getting about 5 support tickets about how to install the Teacher app on their smartphones with a pin code and then it all went quite and people just got on with using the system. It was an rather enjoyable experience but maybe i'm looking back with rose tinted glasses. Any move has its ups and downs.

Well the BETT show was certainly interesting... No Capita Sims or EES stand of course and not a whiff of Sims anywhere. Says it all really. I saw the Bromcom and Arbor stands very busy most of the day, also spoke to a few 3rd party integrators and heard comments like "Everyone is moving to Arbor" and "Yes we integrate with all MIS's now, infact thats where most of our new business is coming from". One side conversation I had with a Bromcom sales rep said that they won an complete Local Authority. Thats 200+ schools. I can't remember which one though. The market is certainly shifting.

Yep agreed, and also there are already good web layers above sims such as Edulink. And thats not even taking into account all the issues with the underlying database being slow and not fit for purpose any more.

Best to stay away from long term commitments to the council, especially if they run it. We bought a BT fiber line years ago and install was free with a 5 year contract. Thats long run out now and we pay I think around 6k a year for 500mbit. Its quite competitive these days but of course we can shop around each year or 3 year cycle.

The day I uninstalled Solus for the final time was one of my happiest experiences in the last 10 years of work. No more updates when you go cloud, new features just appear on the Monday morning as if like magic!

An entire glossy video telling people not to move away without a _single_ screenshot of their "NextGen" product. You honestly could not make this stuff up And reading the guide it seems they have had to write yet another integration product that needs to be installed locally to get Sims to talk to the cloud. Just complete madness to build on top of legacy Sims again trying to shoehorn a complicated local SQL database into a modern cloud UI.

Looks very nice! Loving the susbscribe to updates feature, it even lets you add planned maintance into a calendar. Very cool.

We have Mac's in our music department and they work very well, in fact I hardly have to do anything. We just get them on the wireless and have local logins for each one that are locked down. Students just use onedrive to access their documents and sharepoint for the music department files. Works very well to be fair.

I have good contacts with Microsoft employees, living in the same area as their headquarters and I can tell you that most of them were just as suprised as us about the new version of Windows. It was apparently a marketing department decision and many people were confused inside the organization as well. Marketing won in the end apparently!