Take for example the last few updates (Feb, Feb re-release and March). Like good little soldiers we upgraded one evening soon after February came out. Unfortunately it completely stomped all over our ability to add new teaching staff thanks to a bug which Capita themselves took quite a few weeks to really get a handle on. It also made three commonly-used menu options crash SIMS.net completely. We were told that a patch was being prepared but it would be unlikely to be finished until the March release, so Capita advised us to restore our SIMS server from backup tapes. Ahem…

I’m sure you can imagine the look of glee on the faces of our administrative staff as we told them we were giving them the opportunity to repeat all the work they’d done in SIMS/SIMS.net since we applied the February update several days earlier! Hmm. So that evening we restored from a backup taken before the update and for reasons unfathomable to me (possibly workstation-end) it somehow managed not to fix the problem. Luckily Capita then chose to release a patch to fix the problem. After waiting for everyone to get out of SIMS that night I found that it wasn’t created for our version of the database (we hadn’t been issued the Feb re-release). A call to Capita next morning lead to the re-release and patch being made available via SOLUS. Patch applied that evening. Didn’t fix anything. Oh well, there’s always the March update…

So a couple of days later the March update arrives. Much fanfare. That goes on quite smoothly (they’ve broken SOLUS in a couple of places but it’s nothing too tragic) and it’s all installed before the caretakers start jangling their keys at me. Unfortunately it’s not made a jot of difference to the problems that are now plaguing three of our most active SIMS users.

So now we are at the stage of requiring a site-specific fix, which means uploading our 1.2GB (zipped) database at ~50KB/s over what appears to be the only cobbled section of the information superhighway. Currently 15 failed upload attempts down and I’m starting to lose the will to live. Tomorrow morning I will probably give in and send it by DVD.

To give Capita credit where it’s due, their support people seem intelligent, responsive and genuinely keen to fix problems. It’s just a shame that they seem to have too many bug creators (programmers) for their team of bug spotters (testers).

BEWARE!

The import procedure that Microsoft suggests Class Server administrators use is, well, rubbish.. behold:

!UpdateCls
PrimaryKey	ID	Title
ID	[C:History 6]	History 6
.Teachers
Teacher
AllisonBrown

(header rows emboldened)

That mess would have to be created in Excel, saved to a “Microsoft Excel XML Spreadsheet Format” and then imported via the CSProvision tool on the Class Server to add AllisonBrown as Teacher of History 6. Those 6 rows of spreadsheet generate precisely 1 row in the database (!) which looks like:

ClassID	TeacherID
597	412

(those are the primary key values from the Classes and Persons tables)

If you want to add another teacher to another class, it’ll take you yet another 6 rows and because Microsoft made the syntax multi-line, you’ll have to use a whacking great macro if you plan to generate the data automatically. Lame? Lame! Faced with the proposition of adding teachers to well over 900 classes, Microsoft’s recommended method went hurtling binward.

Instead I decided to pull the classIDs and teacherIDs out of SQL Server then create a lookup table in Excel. That let me generate a ClassID – TeacherID mapping from my SIMS.net CSV file, resulting in 2 long columns of numbers. Import that into the SQL Server “MapTeachersToClasses” table manually and Bob’s your uncle! Job done easily in a couple of hours.

The only challenge remaining now is to get the pupils and their pupil-class mappings into CS4. That should be relatively straightforward – it’s only hampered by the lack of a direct link between SIMS.net and Active Directory. For that trick I shall be using the UPN from SIMS.net and creating the mother of all lookup tables with every child in school listed by username, Active Directory SID and SIMS.net UPN. Ungh!

To be continued…