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SIMS the MIS of choice supporting teachers, senior leaders and wider staff with the tools to efficiently drive improvement in their schools.
This document is intended for integrator use and under a development support agreement. This document only applies to SIMS 7.
The use of automation for reporting is subject to the terms of an ESS SIMS Technical Partner Agreement.
Integrators will need:
ESS will provide reports for customers and charge for these on a time and materials basis. Typically, the starting rate is ½ day consultancy charge and enquiries should be directed to partner management.
It is a command line application that will extract data from SIMS 7 and post the data to STDOUT. The application uses report definitions that exist within SIMS reporting tools. Reports can be imported using a complementary tool CommandReportImporter which can import report definitions in to a school’s SIMS 7 system for use either through SIMS or via CommandReporter.
The credentials of a SIMS user must be provided to enable access to data and data access is limited to the rights provided to that user by the school.
Command reporter is a very useful part of a developer’s armoury but is not the answer to every project’s needs; for example it cannot be used to write data back to SIMS 7.
Command reporter often affords the most cost effective method for integrators to use to extract data from SIMS 7.
Reports are prepared at the integrator’s development unit and then the report definitions are shipped with their application to the customer’s site.
See <Link>. This link downloads our quick reference guide for SIMS reporting.
Integrators must ensure that any data processed using the command reporter is with the customer’s consent and is compliant with GDPR.
The reporting engine is designed for use by school staff and so should be relatively easy for Integrators to use. The usual sticking point is the need for partners to understand the data being returned to them and matching that against their needs. For example, the reporting engine can either provide a set of year groups that a child has been in over time or their current year group.
Further complexity is introduced by the need to break up data exports in to manageable chunks. For example, a report can be created that lists a student’s parents, classes and assessments. If the average student has 2 parents (assuming numbers vary between 0 and 7), 10 classes and 100 assessments then the average student would have 2000 data rows returned. Such reports should be broken down to avoid this problem and be best done as 3 reports, one for parents, one for classes and a third for assessments. Integrators would then join up the data as their needs require.
All reports are visible to our joint customers which allows schools to compare the stated activities of integrator’s systems with the data extracted by them.