Dear Colleague,
The Summer 2021 upgrade of SIMS, FMS and Discover is now available upon request via SOLUS3. This upgrade contains a few new features along with the update currently required for the Autumn Census and Workforce Census.
Some schools will apply this in house or via a third party IT provider, please make the relevant person aware this is now available upon request. If School ICT are responsible for your upgrade we will be rolling this out by taking a phased approach over the coming weeks. 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 helpdesk a call. If you are unsure about who does your upgrade please contact our helpdesk for clarification. Some schools may wish to have the update applied in the Easter break for example
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 will see a SOLUS3 popup. You can click on the “Deploy Now” button and 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 7.2 and FMS to 6.2. 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. 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 these we have found can cause issues.
For any newly supported customers joining our service, if you have not already done so, please ensure that your school has informed Capita by email that School ICT Services 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 Capita management console. If you are unsure if you have done this please call us and we can confirm this has been done on your behalf.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us.
