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SIMS, FMS and Discover SOLUS3 Summer Upgrade – 7th July 2025

By 3rd July 2025No Comments

The Summer upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover will be available via SOLUS3 from 7th July 2025.

 

This email is aimed at the technical department in school; we would be grateful if you would forward it on as required. If you have no technical staff, please call the help desk for assistance.

Where School ICT complete the upgrade on your behalf, or for turn IT on Schools who have an upgrades and maintenance contract, please see below for how this will work.

  • Using a phased approach, we will email the school to arrange a date for the upgrade from Monday 7th July onwards; the upgrade will be released from 4pm on your upgrade day.
  • If you would like the upgrade applying on a specific date or day of the week, please let us know ASAP by replying to this email or giving the help desk a call.

For those schools who do not have upgrades completed by School ICT Services or turn IT on, we will release the upgrades to you on Monday 7th July 2025.

The software that will be authorised is listed below; this list is dependent upon the modules utilised by the school.

  • SIMS (Summer 2025) Full Release (7.224)
  • FMS (Summer 2025) Full Release (6.224)
  • SIMS Discover (Summer 2025)

If you require any support, please contact us via one of the below methods:

For any newly supported customers joining our service, if you have not already done so, please ensure that your school has informed ESS by email that School ICT Services or Turn It On are undertaking support on your behalf (this process is included in the welcome pack we provide to new customers). This will ensure that we are able to deploy patches and upgrades to your establishment centrally through our online ESS management console. If you are unsure whether you have done this, please call us and we can confirm whether this has been done on your behalf (or not, as the case may be).

New Features and Release Notes

 The Summer 2025 upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover has some new features including:

Primary Schools

  • School Census Autumn Return – Statutory Returns
  • Pupil Premium Import – Now available on GIAP ready for 25/26
  • Reports New FSM Ever6 Report – you can import using the following file Predefined_reports_v7.224.RptDef
  • School Workforce Census (SWC) – Statutory Returns
  • SIMS NextGen Menu – A new menu titled ‘SIMS NextGen’ has been added to the Top-Level menus for users to easily navigate to the following NextGen Apps

Secondary Schools

  • Exams – Users can delete Component results directly
  • Exams Group Filter uses the term Sex not Gender
  • School Census Autumn Return – Statutory Returns
  • Pupil Premium Import – Now available on GIAP ready for 25/26
  • Reports New FSM Ever6 Report you can import using the following file Predefined_reports_v7.224.RptDef
  • School Workforce Census (SWC) – Statutory Returns
  • SIMS NextGen Menu – A new menu titled ‘SIMS NextGen’ has been added to the Top-Level menus for users to easily navigate to the following NextGen Apps

For further details of the new features, please take a look at the release notes which are available on our customer portal.

School ICT customer portal – School ICTS customer portal

turn IT on customer portal – turn IT on customer portal – navigate to Files | MIS | SIMS Release Notes

Important Notes Regarding Upgrades

As usual, prior to performing any upgrade, please ensure that you have a successful back-up of your SIMS system.

For those schools that do their own upgrade we would recommend stopping any third-party app services that link to SIMS before running the upgrade as we have found that these can cause issues.

The most successful upgrade deployments occur when all relevant workstations are left switched on but logged out of SIMS. Ensuring that all users have logged out of SIMS prior to the upgrade taking place will help to reduce residual problems. If upgrading overnight, please be aware that workstations that are switched off may fail. If this occurs, please download the upgrade again and re-deploy.

To minimise disruption, the upgrade will be run on your SIMS database via SOLUS3 overnight. Once the workstations are switched on the morning after the upgrade has been run, you should get a screen opening that tells you that your workstation has been upgraded.  If you don’t get this, and you see a SOLUS3 popup, you can click on the “Deploy Now” button:

This will start the upgrade process immediately. If you do not do this, it will wait 2 minutes before continuing automatically. It is then a case of allowing the upgrade to run before opening SIMS/FMS, which should upgrade SIMS to 7.224 and FMS to 6.224. Once the upgrade is complete, if you get an ‘incompatible database’ error when trying to access SIMS or FMS, please contact us so that we can investigate and resolve the issue to prevent this happening in future.

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