sodslaur

I have sent a complaint in about the comms as well. Still received nothing, even to say that service has been restored!

Has anyone received any communication from them not prompted by a message to the support team? I was promised an email would be sent out to customers by 2 sepaprate people, have received nothing.

I managed to get ours off too - it was a very short list as no one managed to log anything today....!

It seems very strange that they are not saying what the problem is? We are relatively new to ClassCharts but I think the comms is very poor. They should be sending out updates even if it's "we're working on it" rather than expecting us to contact them and ask.

I saw the one in february/march time - really useful, but I think our IT people are coming from a different position and knowledge so I might see if there is one they can sign up to.

Really useful thank you. And much more straightforward than the answer we got from our IT providers. They didn't mention the AD/Azure issue at all so that is new information.

I am trying to get a clear picture of the pros and cons of moving away from SalamanderSoft to the O365 integration service that Bromcom offer. Is anyone else looking at this and have any thoughts to offer? Our IT provider is concerned at the 'either on or off' provisioning and also at the amount of work needed to switch until I pointed out that we would switch at the start of the academic year when all that work needs to be done anyway to set up promoted year groups, new classes and so on. But the everything on/off is still the major concern for them. I am coming at this from a purely financial pov - we pay for bromcom one stop shop so why not use it. SalamanderSoft may not charge very much, relatively, but I am trying to get a handle on whether it is sufficiently better to keep paying.

We have the same issue. Cunninghams were quite straight with us that they had no plans to allow direct integration with Bromcom - they tried to sell us their ParentPay equivalent during this conversation! They said they had no room in their roadmap until last quarter of 2021 and even then it's not guaranteed. They may change their mind - the more schools that move to Bromcom and then end up moving to a competitor cashless system because they won't integrate may not be a factor now but anecdotally more and more schools seem to be making the switch from SIMS and the Bromcom one stop shop is a big draw. I did start to investigate other options - Iris/Biostore or whatever it is now, Civica and Liveregister all integrate with Bromcom dinner money. We are migrating other schools at the moment and my time is committed to that but this is probably something we will come back to next year.

We had it for 18 months or so before we moved to Bromcom - it was pretty rubbish, I won't lie. But it was cheap - I think in the region of £150 per school. *some* useful metrics, some not, not really very customisable. Before we switched to Bromcom we were looking at their power bi connection - they released a bit of info and some instructions for exporting information, which was free. obviously that requires some knowledge but given the time again I would go down that route and perhaps spend the schooview money on getting someone to set up a basic dashboard in power bi.

Nightmare. My headache is with Cunninghams who supply all our epos stuff. All my communications just fall into a black hole. I've used every email address that has appeared in the original email chain to set up the change in a vain effort to get a response from anyone at all. I can't get through on the phone. I got one OOO to say they were on furlough, and to email the generic inbox (which I've tried several times). It really is a terrible company for customer service. This might be the final straw for us.

I would agree with all of this. We had the system handed over on Friday just gone and went live on Monday and although there was a considerable amount of setup needed and I worked a lot of the weekend, the fact we're not doing lessons or serving lunches has taken all of the pressure off. I've not had issues getting in touch with Bromcom, there's been no suggestion whatsoever that people were not available to help and all the tickets I've raised have been dealt with so far. I do have an issue with the timetable model that I'm waiting to be picked up but with no lessons happening I'm not too stressed about it. The only big issue I've been having is that our Third parties all appear to have fallen asleep and despite all the invoices paid, calls booked and forms filled in, not one of them got in touch on handover and I've had to chase them to do the work. In fact only three out of our six have set up a live Bromcom connection so far and we're four days in. However that hiccup aside (and I am hoping it is an artefact of furloughed employees and not BAU), the Bromcom side has been very smooth and trouble free. We had booked in person training for go live on Monday as it was a planned CPD day, but in the event Bromcom explained they weren't sending trainers out to schools and they set up webinars instead. Given the circumstances that was the best option and everyone I spoke to afterwards thought the training went well. It has been a lot of work and I've done all of it myself - with support from the principal as well, but it has been a lot, we're a small school so other than some help with the QA for the test migration, I have done everything. We're the first school to go over from the Trust so there's a bit of pressure to get it right. So far so good. I am relieved in some ways that these are not normal times - I've had very few queries from staff as a result so I can just get on with the things needing my attention without emails pinging and people hanging round my desk saying "I know you're busy, but..."!