supportman

No reason to stay with Sims now... Its well out of date. We moved to Bromcom last year and migration was no issue. Nice modern web based MIS and easy to pick up for staff after years of Sims. Even if I had the choice of Sims 8 vs Bromcom (which of course we don't) I would choose Bromcom as its just does many things better than the Sims workflow.

Nice! Thanks will give it a try.

We migrated 5 years of our historical data to Bromcom and while it seemed important at the time, I'm not sure how useful it is. We basically archived all the linked documents from sims using a salamander tool. And created some CSV exports of student data. I think that is just as good as importing it to the new system as its very rarely used. I saw Go4Schools at BETT I think a few years ago, they were looking to build an MIS but didnt seem anywhere near as advanced as Arbour, iSams or Bromcom. This may have changed since the time I saw it and I welcome new entrants into the market!

Thanks, seems that the speed problem with attendance has been fixed by the developers now. Its been a while since I updated this thread so wanted to post about progress. I'm really impressed with recent additions to Bromcom such as the Office 365 Integration (both single sign on as well as user provisioning). Another good feature I did a webinar on is the new quick report feature. Not only has it matched Sims for making quick reports but, I think it has surpassed it adding the formulae and conditional formatting features so we don't need complicated excel spreadsheets. On the not so good side we had to go with another 3rd party timetable product as the Bromcom one didn't really fit our needs and was not cloud based (yet). We've also had some good discussions with Bromcom about improving the room booking side of things. Its great to see they are listening as this is the biggest part of Bromcom our staff have asked to improve. Overall in the school Bromcom is fully settled in now and Sims is a distant memory. Teachers taking registers on mobile devices, live reporting in meetings, all parents and now students using the MCAS app and portal. Its been great and a huge improvement to the school!

Unfortunately not, I tried it but kept corrupting on windows 10 upgrades.

Yes it does. Both Fastrak and IDManager required small local installs but are pretty self contained.

Hi all, One of the very last things with windows 10 is its constant insistence of creating a Mail app icon on a new users profile and sticking it to the taskbar. Is there any way to stop this from being created via Group Policy of any other reg hack?

We moved away from Sims last year and have gone pretty much cloud everything since then with a plan to retire the old remote desktop server in the summer. We still use onsite AD but synced with Azure AD. Salamandersoft to sync all the accounts from bromcom. We have Onedrive to replace the staff personal drive We have Sharepoint files to replace the staff shared area legacy drive All staff use Edge Chromium and log in with their office 365 accounts so its single sign on after that. Seems to work well so far and intune is the next logical step. We have bought P1 licenses from Microsoft which I believe cover it.

Bromcom actually just released this last month. Full Azure user creation and group sync for Office 365. No local AD though. - - - Updated - - - I heard a rumour that salamander were working on a cloud product of some kind, not sure if its just the management side of things or what but could be cool!

We've used both but I preferred ruler (rebranded to locker now). Ruler was much nicer in terms of its interface and easier to understand. Salamander is nice once its setup but any change requires them to remote in and set a load of complicated scripts up. They both performed pretty much the same.

Yes the pricing for all 3 of our MIS quotes was nothing like that. I'd suggest anyone who procures a new MIS gets at least 3 quotes and compares them to each other on both value as well as features. We ended up saving money when moving from Sims even before adding local server and Microsoft licensing costs.

Looks quite expensive based on user cost per month

Its important to look at all the third party products included as well and price the MIS as a whole. After moving to Bromcom last year we have managed to cancel over 10k worth of 3rd party software that now Bromcom does internally. That includes Comms software, Cashless payments, Room bookings, Parents evenings, Parent Portal and teacher/parent apps. I'm guessing the same price advantages of an all-in-one solution come with Arbor as well.

Just trying this for a single user, but when I click on import it asks for a CSV file upload. Am I missing something here? Ahh OK just seen the reply earlier. Fine once you know how

Both iSams and Bromcom came out significantly cheaper than Arbor for us with their full packages. I think possibly because Arbour are pretty rigid with their pricing. We are a 1,000 pupil secondary school.

GREAT NEWS! A browser version is what we all want Let us know when its done, even if its simple. It really is needed.

Has anyone turned on location based conditional access on their Office 365 tenants? We now have a rule that bans anyone signing in from another country. We've done it here and it appears to work well for IP4 addresses. One problem appears to be that iPhones now give out an IP6 address and you cant filter by location. We got around this by whitelisting all IP6 addresses but it kind of defeats the point of only allowing UK IP addresses. Has anyone else done this?

Yes we use single sign on with Office 365 here with bromcom. Works perfectly.

We evaluated both, Bromcom won and we are happy with that. Arbour was nice but it looked very simplistic to me and they appeared to have more expertise in the Primary school field. Bromcoms apps and parent portal are great as well as Single sign on with Google/Office365. Arbour came out more expensive as well which is worth bearing in mind.

We gave up in the end, probably the worst part of Bromcom I would say (other than their room booking system of course), everything else is great!!. Apparently the etimetabler can't even find dynamic spaces in your timetable and you need to run reports to design the timetable. We are most likely going to buy Keith Johnsons timetabler. And then just build manually into Bromcom. https://www.timetabler.com/ I have attempted to contact bromcom about improvements in this area but have had no replies really on progress. Its a shame.

Suprised anyone is buying a SAN these days in education, they are designed for data centers really. Local storage with a good backup as well as cloud services is surely the future.

A little off topic, but strange you need to delete local profiles. Your students logins must take about 3 x as long having to create a new profile each time... We are 1,100 and have local logins, works well and we only have 256gb SSD's in machines as standard. We just delprof them at the end of the year generally.

Direct link here to the update file https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB5001567

Urgent Fix released out of the normal update window https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/march-15-2021-kb5001567-os-builds-19041-868-and-19042-868-out-of-band-6e0844a2-7551-4b2d-9c4b-4274a5949bf3

Yes we've done this as well in the past, just a case of getting through to them. We just rang them.