Earlier this month, Bromcom announced that they were offering a £1,000 prize to anyone solving the issue of how schools migrating away from the ESS SIMS MIS to another provider could ensure that they can migrate all the school data easily and comprehensively.
This followed recent announcements that ESS SIMS MIS backups could not be used for this purpose since these apparently contain ESS SIMS IP. Accordingly, schools were instructed that they should be using the SIMS API’s or the SIMS Report Generator facility and using backups for migration would be illegal.
Subsequent to these announcements, several MIS providers and other industry insiders claimed that this method was cumbersome and did not enable all necessary school data to be migrated.
Claims and counter claims have been bandied about, culminating in Bromcom, Arbor and IRIS Education promising to support schools’ legal costs if these arise from migrating to them using a SIMS backup, and the CMA has also been pulled in to investigate the issue.
Bromcom then announced their ‘Open Competition’ where they would provide a prize of £1,000 to anyone solving what they describe as three key issues:
- The reporting engine is not able to export the SIMS ‘lookup’ tables
- Certain fields not available in the reporting engine
- Legacy Module data is virtually non-existent
Bromcom were not asking anyone to actually build an application that could solve all these issues, but rather to simply prove that it is possible.
Bromcom appointed two independent moderators, Damon Hatcher and Nick Finnemore, to judge the entries.
The competition garnered much interest from the Edugeek ‘techies ‘ involved in schools, and many suggested solutions were put forward. However, despite some great ideas, apparently none of these completely solved all aspects of the requirements.
Accordingly, Bromcom’s independent moderators decided to make four awards, after expanding the prize pot from £1,000 to £5,000, with prizes all being donated to the charity of the winners’ choice.
The 4 prize winners are as follows:
Special mention with £2,000 donation:
Marci – Automated processing of PDF exports using Power automate
Winners of £1,000 donation (in alphabetical order)
dhicks – Parsed PDF file concept
Steve21 – Coded behaviour outputs with report generator
Vikpaw – Lookup queries through SIMS API
Since nobody was able to fully resolve all the requirements of the competition, Bromcom stated that “This yet again justifies the use of SQL database backup files as an inevitable process for schools to migrate from SIMS to a new MIS.”
Obviously, this is going to be an ongoing issue and we await the outcome of the CMA investigation whose analysis and review of information gathered is due to complete by the end of this month.
