supportman

Matrix 4, I thought the last half was good but the first half was just a re-hash of the original. Its like they had no new ideas and just copyed it word for word. It got better in the 2nd half with new ideas and scenes but overall was dissapointing.

We also moved to school cloud's 'parents evening system'. Works very well for virtual meetings and very good value.

There is absolutely no need to be worried, our key staff had dedicated 2hr webinars for their particular areas from a Bromcom training lady who was familiar with Sims as well. They were up and running as normal by lunchtime on the first day. We had similar fears when we moved but it turned out to be nothing, It actually made me change my view on some of the staff that I thought would be difficult or stuck in their ways, all credit to them for adapting. Because ESS are now owned by private equity and their sole purpose in life is to extract every single penny from their new asset. Locking schools in who are a little slower on moving is a clear business decision to maintain their market share. Some schools might not move now, but over the years I think it will become apparent thats its impossible to "fix" sims into a modern MIS. All the while native cloud competitors will surge ahead, meanwhile schools are locked into very long contracts and simply unable to move without wasting public money on duplication.

Still a very small amount in the grand scheme of things. It really suprises me so many people simply sat back and renewed for 3 years with a legacy software company that has an inferior product and has had for a few years now.

The systems are totally different in terms of how they store documents, so i'm not sure its possible in an automatic way but probably someone will do it for a cost. We exported all our linked documents easily and then use that as an archive and a file share. Bromcom is a much more full system, so many documents you will find are not needed any more. Most things like reports, medical, Assesment, Letters home to parents, SEN ect is held in the system natively. EDIT: On a more general note, its a good idea to not try and shoehorn old sims "ways of doing things" into the new MIS. There are many advantages of a new MIS that makes work much more streamlined.

We moved to Bromcom last year. Very happy with the change and it was much easier than anticipated.

The new Windows Surface SE with Windows 11 for sure. The whole point of them is to replicate google chrome. Surface Laptop SE Slim Laptop for Students - Microsoft Surface for Business

Seems to me that most people are simply frienghtend to move. 35 pages of discussion and only 1 primary confirmed to have moved. I've tried my best in this thread to show how easy it was for us to move away from Sims as a large secondary, but there are still so many comments about SLT not being on board or "not having enough time". We had all those issues and still made it work Feels really sad to me that all these schools will be using a legacy MIS until at least 2024...

Regarding Parents evenings, we moved to: SchoolCloud Parents Evening Since there are no logins for parents other than knowning their childs details, it took about 30mins to setup and get working. Also allowed remote parents evenings which was a bonus.

I wrote about it earlier but it took our staff about 10mins to learn the new MIS. It really wasnt a big change at all for them. In fact most very much welcomed the new teacher smartphone app that let them do things much quicker. Sure it takes a while to learn from a data manager point of view.

Lots of talk and good discussion in this thread, but i've yet to see anyone actually move Has anyone taken the jump yet?

8 Schools from River Learning Trust moving to Bromom. Home - River Learning Trust https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ali-guryel-18892715_secondaries-multiacademytrust-activity-6874762168953393152-OArV

Sure start a new thread for that, this is just to track where the market is headed.

Just a word of warning, but when we left Sims they were very clear we had to cancel before the 31st December otherwise we would have to pay another years costs because they had a 3 month notice period. No idea how this works with the 3 year agreements but we had to cancel the year before to move at Easter time.

Vote with your feet people!

Cant help as not done it yet but I couldnt even get past the new admin area and some licensing issues! Interested to hear what others have done. I don't even think its called intune any more

Another 7 to Bromcom: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ali-guryel-18892715_were-pleased-to-welcome-bromcom-as-an-everything-activity-6873759979652870144-6G8p

To be fair they have said that they are recruiting developers and making "significant" investments into Sims. But I've heard it all before... Add to that, private equity just buys up these sucesful companies and tends to wind down support, management and development overheads to make money. It is literally how they work with little regard for the long term future as their main aim usually is to sell it on for a profit. God knows how they are going to do that with Sims though with a failing product and market saturation. The only way is down!

All I think when I hear people renewing, is the next 3 years of upgrade chaos, disjointed and out of date systems and 7% price increases.

Another blog post from Bromcom about the situation. https://www.bromcom.com/blogs/g-cloud-procurement Some nice timelines in there as well.

I like it this way round. It was a clear issue they knew about and fixed within 45mins. I'd much rather be drinking tea than having to troubleshoot it Whats more is that because Bromcom, Arbor ect are the developers as well as the hosters they have a whole view of the system so fixes should be very quick in theory.

Now thats great support!! thanks for the explanation and quick fix.

Thanks its working, but big distruption in our school this morning. Ouch! Not even the Apps worked to take registers Glad its fixed.

Absolutely no idea how they will do it, but to me its a terrible decision with way. Re-writing in a modern web framework on-top fo scalable Azure of AWS seems the obvious choice with a "One Time" full migration path from local SQL. Building yet more techincal debt on top of the Sims product with some hybrid solution is just crazy project management decision and reaks of non developer people getting involved

Since the Sims license is perpetual, this makes the most sense to me for anyone stuck what to do. Its not like there is a switch off date if you do that. Sims will continue to work even after April 2022, all you would need to do was sign the renewal anytime after the date and simply get updates again. Saying that, I would advise everyone to do what @localzuk is doing and look at the 4 major competitors who all have good MIS products ASAP.