supportman

So we are about half way through the summer holidays and Bromcom is now our MIS after an easy enough migration. Its a live system now!! Some of the things we've learned along the way: - Both Wonde and Groupcall have cloud exporters which are easy enough to migrate to Bromcom. Both work as advertised with Bromcom. - Migration was pretty painless but we are starting again with behavior and reporting - Staff photos are stretched after the migration due to different aspect ratio - The MCAS parent app is pretty poor on android, lots of parents complaining that the app crashes. - The MCAS parent app works great on iOS - The MCAS parent web page works well but its very confusing for parents onboarding as they have a separate username now which a lot of parents are confusing with the email address. Why can't it just be an email address to logon? - No easy way to find out the parents who have not registered on the MCAS invite web page - Bromcom permissions are quite complicated. They come with some standard roles but that doesn't seem to cover everything so you need to create more roles. We ended up just giving rights to our office staff with everything except for staff details and personnel. Still loving Bromcom, its much better MIS than Sims in my opinion, even if it does have a few issues.

I just finished using Khipu Networks for our Aruba controller upgrade and Wifi 6 AP install. Very happy with the service.

I don't think Microsoft supports roaming profiles any more, we just local profiles here and works perfectly.

If you guys do any work like this, then you should put it on your website. I'm sure a lot of schools would like the Sliding whiteboard thing over a screen.

As a school thats recently moved away from Sims and was also worried about this entrenchment and particularly 3rd party software that people loved and relied on, I can safely say that it wasn't an issue. We moved and simply brought many of those services into the MIS. Its worked very well and you realise how limited and broken up Sims actually is when you finally move to another product.

Just no idea really where to start! Feels so complicated. Currently we just run a transparent proxy for all BYOD users without authentication. Does the job!

We do this also on Radius with Unify AC pro AP's. Works well with the NPS server I installed on a 2019 server machine. I havent worked out how to integrate the smoothwall yet though.

Just horribly in debt. Basically a junk stock these days. Thats why they never invested in Sims or any other of their software services. Sinking ship! Whoever buys Sims would be mad to pay 500 million. Firesales don't work that way.

Why have a phone when you can use a laptop or webcam?

Love that desking!

Yep we are going ahead during lockdown. this week in fact. I think its a great time to do stuff that would normally be very difficult to implement. The staff have been constantly requesting access to our MIS from home and remote desktop just isnt good enough any more. A cloud solution solves a lot of user issues right now.

So today we are at the end of our test system on Bromcom and move to the live setup next week hopefully. Here are a couple of notes along the way: - Training has been excellent, very comprehensive and fantastic to be able to download the video at the end of the session for reference - Our implementation manager has been good, although I have had to prompt him to contact me a few times when I have been expecting a call. No weekly meetings like others have suggested which is a little disappointing. - We've brought forward our live install data so we can do the pre admissions and timetable on Bromcom this year instead of importing from Sims in September in a rush. - Bromcom permissions have very limited standard roles, you need to create a lot of custom ones just to get normal job operations up and running. - Online payments are possible from the Bromcom Parent App. We are getting this integrated with Biostore tills. - Data migration has been good overall but missing assessment data has come up as the main issue. - Distributing parent app credentials seems very labour intensive. There is no "send to all" parent email button and I have been told Mail merging is the best way. - Parent accounts bulk creation uses a weird random username which is very easy to forget I think. Its a shame Bromcom cant create the username as an email like our old system. - Had to prompt our implementation manager to enable the Parent Portal and SMTP server features on our test install. - Gmail didn't work with the SMTP server config but Office 365 did. - Support has been great and fast when needed via their support portal. I'll update again once we go live.

Other than re-doing the fingerprints, no issues really.

Do we have to install the Onedrive sync client on the client machines? If so which version?

I cant find that GPO setting, do you know where it is exactly?

I know, we are one of those customers who moved I guess capita are trying to sell before those customer migrations show up in the actual financial figures in any real amount. I don't understand how they would ever build a SASS product out of Sims anyway, its far too complicated to migrate with too much legacy cruft.

Because 90% of customers haven't moved in the last 10 years which shows that existing customers are very valuable.

We have just moved from Cunninghams to Biostore, Cunninghams support was just too bad.

We are a grammar and recently moved to Bromcom, loving it so far. Much better than Sims in my opinion. iSams is also worth checking out as it has some overlap with grammer schools on the admissions side of things.

Actually quite a fast and usable site

We just tested it with a few users and yes they set it up themselves. Takes a few clicks and works well.

I just had a seminar on fortigate, looks like stateful inspection is the way to go in the future. Not having a proxy server and doing authentication with a client on the DC seems a great idea. I was quite impressed, although their interface was also quite dated!

I was going to say exactly the same thing! Looks like it uses standard form input fields without any css. Rather web 1.0.... I'd love to see new entrants and alternatives in the school filter field but a nice clean modern interface is a must really. Especially for a product we would sign up for 3 or 5 years.

"Created teams policies" haha pretty sure microsoft has now done that with the policy packages!

@JohnCondon probably has all the answers