supportman

Nothing but positives from me as well, its great and hopefully going to replace 4 different systems we currently buy. I was particularly impressed with the install procedure and the ease of which it was done. Feature wise the cover and registration works as expected but the room booking is a little limited.

We run a spare Hyper-V host for an emergency. We use Intel NUC's here in the server cabinet with Windows Server 2019 on them. Virtualisation makes redundancy and disaster recovery so easy these days, it really is a non issue if you design it simply.

No fault torrerance, SSDs are pretty stable if you buy quality ones. We backup with veeam anyway, so restore is very quick if the worst happened.

Nope, works perfectly. All our Dells have 3rd party SSDs and not had a single issue.

We use samsung SSDs in all our Dell 320 and 330s. No issues here.

Whats the noise level like?

My preference is local storage, Sans are designed for high density data centres really. Not small organisations like schools.

Just out of interest how do the cloud versions work? i'm fed up of local servers so this is something we may look at in the future but it has to be cloud based.

We've been moving towards cloud only systems for a number of years now, our SMT are on board with that and keep asking me why Sims hasn't made the jump yet. Specifically they want registers to be taken over a 3G connection and emergency contact details available on trips. So I have exactly the opposite problem We've been testing EduLink One all day today and I have to say its pretty much the gateway product we've been looking for with a nice web interface for the most common teacher usage of Sims. Emerge nearly did it all those years ago but stalled in development. Anyway i'm really impressed with Edulink so far... I'd jump to a better modern MIS in a heartbeat though if it existed(looking at the competition it simply isn't out there in my opinion). The technical debt around Sims is astonishing. EDIT: to say the shift to MATS is going to speed up the shift for sure. MATs need overviews of schools which cloud systems give them easily.

Very well said, all the last 3 comments. I couldn't agree more!

Excellent thats good to know, as we already have unique email addresses in AD hopefully it should be easy. Great that they do this for us!

In our case we have a need for teachers to take registers over the web mainly but also using a smart phone or 4G device. Also emergency contact details on trips. Capita Sims simply does not offer this at the time. We tried Groupcall Emerge in the past but it wasn't great. EduLinkOne mentioned above is starting to gain traction and has a fair few good reviews on the link I posted on edugeek. For about 2k a year but does lots of things like parent engagement, comms and room bookings which we currently pay well over 2k for a year from separate providers so it actually might end up being cost negative if our trial works out as expected. Again Capita charge lots for this and even recommend bolt-ons like roombookingsystem which is a separate company. There is a good blog on the MIS market state of play here: Bring more data Market churn is about 3% which tells you everything about the competition. We've looked around but the school MIS market is in a terrible state, there is no real proper challenger to Capita Sims that I can work out that has gained traction in the last 10 years and I keep a very close eye on the figures. Coming from a startup culture myself i'm amazed no other company has sat down and written something ground breaking like HCSS did for the financial side of things (now sadly overtaken by access group). The closest I have seen to a good cloud MIS was Bromcom but I am still not convinced. Other competitors focus on Primary schools or specific geographical areas. Its really a £200 million market ready to be disrupted... Oh and I entirely agree with you about long term solutions, lets just hope one of the Capita competitors steps up and releases something ground breaking. I have my doubts though...

We've basically given up waiting now and are looking at other solutions ontop of Sims. EduLinkOne looks interesting and would allow our teachers to take registers and do the Sims basics using a web page. Just testing it now and it seems to do virtually everything our teachers would need for a Cloud MIS while keeping Sims running fine in the background. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/204147-edulinkone-singing-praises.html

Just setting the trial of this up and its absolutely brilliant. All setup in about 10mins! One thing I am stuck on is how to populate active directory 'Office' field(physicalDeliveryOfficeName in LDAP terms) with the “MIS id”. Has anyone done this? How do I find the MIS ID if we use Sims? Staff should be easy enough to populate manually but are there any tricks on populating students with the MIS id?

Yep just adding up the messaging, parents evenings, parent portal, room booking we probably spend 5k a year on all that currently. Looks good for the 2k cost and cloud based. Hmmm...

Love the look of this, are this company new or is it a new product? I've not heard of them before. What kind of prices are we looking at?

Yep always important to understand the difference between some hosted bodge job of a legacy system and full Software as a Service cloud products.

We used to have Emerge but it wasn't really a success, it was very expensive for what it was and needed a very old fashioned exporter program that kept crashing on the server. Not tried the Sims solution...

Just found some more info on a random Powerpoint that Capita had on MyAccount SOURCE: https://myaccount.capita-cs.co.uk/Search/DownloadDocument?s=RESOURCEID-1-6011

VSl looks pretty good, they mention that it can be £0.10 per GB but I think thats their best deal. https://www.vsl-net.com/services/veeam-cloud-connect

Just setup on the Heads PAs account as a normal contact group, you can use internal and external addresses. No need for global groups in this case. This is what we do.

I take your point (every setup and business need is different), but its worth looking at the technology of RAID specifically and why it was created originally. RAID became popular in servers for 2 reasons: both improved speed of mechanical disks and redundancy because mechanical disk moving parts tend to wear out and suddenly die. Speed is of course a non-issue these days with SSD so we can discount that one right away. Now if you take a look at SSD's they also don't wear out(OK technically they do but you are likely never to reach that point unless you write(not read) Terabytes of data for 5 years constantly), the only thing that tends to go wrong with them is the SSD controller on power events. Now Samsung and Intel both have internal protection against this and proven stable storage. I've abruptly power cycled some SSDs hundreds of times as a test and they have just booted straight back up without issue. In a test lab I challenge you to go pull the power cord from your RAID setups 100 times and see if it survives. Its an extreme test but should show that the biggest single point of failure is not the storage any more, its the controllers. It all comes down to a numbers game in the end, but I think personally RAID causes more issues than it fixes in the modern day. I have not tested a RAID restore recently but i'm pretty sure our virtualisation backup solution would be quicker than rebuilding an array from some 1990s bios interface. I know which one I would prefer anyway.

As I mentioned above you don't need RAID with SSD technology assuming you buy the correct drives and not some Kingston or Crucial cheap thing. We use Samsung SSDs here for our main storage, both 2TB and 4TB variants.

Thanks for this, very useful. We've had a load of spam email phishing links recently with a blue button going to various .host addresses. Just group blocked them all with the above method so very happy

All 2TB samsung SSD here, but no RAID. I don't see the point these days with instant recovery. I also read on here that the more disks you have, the more likely one is to fail.