After upgrading to 7.106 (June Update), colleagues at Ladybridge High School have discovered an issue with the display of preferred forenames in Take Register.

Prior to upgrading (from 7.102 March Update), students” preferred forenames were displayed in Take Register. After upgrading to 7.106, legal forenames were displayed, causing a degree of embarrassment to some students.

SIMS .net 7.104 (May Main Release) introduced an additional Attendance Setup option. I”ve detailed below the steps that need to be taken in order reinstate preferred forenames.

1. In SIMS .net, click on Tools | Setups | Attendance Setup | Module Setup
2. On Panel 2 Display of Names, put a tick in the box next to Show Preferred Forename instead of Legal Forename
3. Click on the Save button

A number of schools have contacted me to discuss Capita’’s SIMS Infrastructure Update Tool. According to Paul Christie at Ladybridge High School, RM are advising that this program be run on all SIMS workstations.

The SIMS Infrastructure Update Tool does the following:

• Installs .net Framework 2 and 3
• Removes old setup files from PCs which had SIMS installed prior to March 2004
• Installs two bar code fonts used by SIMS Partners

Even if .net Framework 2 hasn”t been rolled out, I suspect most schools won”t need to use this tool as PCs will have been rebuilt/replaced since March 2004. Also, unless schools use optical mark readers, the bar code fonts won”t be required.

In addition, Judith Holden at Sharples Secondary School has reported that the program takes a long time to run. Judith has kindly informed us that Capita document InfrastructRNa_12377.pdf suggests it can take 15 minutes or more depending on network configuration and memory. Judith has also tried installing .net Framework 3 onto a PC with 1GB RAM and that too took a long time to install.

The SIMS Infrastructure Update Tool can be downloaded directly from Capita by clicking here.

To download the SIMS bar code fonts on their own, please click here.

If you wish to discuss further, please don”t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment below.