SchoolITLackey

Tester - do you happen by any chance to be a Bromcom employee? Each of your posts so far appears to promote Bromcom applications ....

SIMS should do pretty much everything you want (not sure about the SMS / texting to parents). A mixture of Lesson Monitor for lesson-by-lesson registration plus SIMS Assessment Manager plus Learning Gateway for the rest. Bromcom also can provide everything you are looking for, but the drawback is you would have to buy their full MIS solution (or at least Bromcom attendance module). Lesson by lesson registration tool is good, their eMarkBook system was a bit of a nightmare to be honest when we used, but I believe can link to SIMS Assessment Manager. Their online portal looked good at BETT this year ..... Not used PARs, but I know Jenny from PARs posts her so I am sure she can provide information on her company's product functionality.

CMIS data structures are pretty tricky to understand without a data dictionary. And I echo what everyone else is saying, once you start writing (or deleting / editing!) data directly within the CMIS database, you will negate the support agreement and CMIS will be quite within their rights to withdraw support.

Bromcom offer a Mobile registration solution using mobile internet, apparently can talk directly to SIMS, there is an earlier thread regarding this. Not sure of price, planning to call in on their stand at BETT to have a demo / chat and see how the price matches against SIMS Mobile. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/27588-sims-mobile-3-fire-register-2.html

Chris Thanks for your reply, very interesting. (As above - uanble to access mobiel register link via your company website) So, if I understand your reply, Bromcom's mobile register will talk directly to the SIMS database in real-time, without the need for the Bromcom database / attendance system etc. Would any Bromcom software have to be installed on our school network at all? So, if we were interested, we would just purchase the Bromcom mobile app software (we would supply our own phones), any platform restrictions, e.g. Windows Mobile 5 / 6?

Chris Bromcom Very costly in our opinion when we looked at Bromcom's solution. I presume that the school would need the full Bromcom attendance core system as well to implement Bromcom mobile registers? Is this correct? We moved over from Bromcom to SIMS for registration last year after a history of problems with a very poor 2-way interface to our SIMS .NET, slow reports etc. (and don't even mention MarkBook! ) - and we would not be looking to change again. Will be looking at SIMS Mobile solution for our PE staff, we'll make the decision when we have visited BETT and had a look at the SIMS Mobile app.