Richard Willis - SharePoint Learning Kit Coordinator, SalamanderSoft Owner » Sims

New Free Utility for Sims.Net – List Of All Reports

Richard — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 21:22:37 +0000

I have just created another free utility for Sims – a utility to export details of all reports in Sims into a csv file. That’s reports as in the reporting engine, not student reports. This will allow you to easily see what reports are in Sims, who created them and hence whether you want to remove any. Inspired by this thread on EduGeek.

To use:

The utility must be run on a machine where Sims.net workstation or server is installed.
First run GenerateConfigFile.bat. You must also run this everytime Sims.Net is updated. If Sims.Net is not installed in c:\program files\Sims\Sims .Net, you will need to modify the bat file.
Copy a connect.ini into the folder.
Run SimsReportList from the command line with 3 arguments, Sims username, Sims password and output folder.
SimsReportList will then save the report details into the file.

You can run SimsReportList.exe /? for a brief help summary.

Download Here.

Bulk Loading Photos From Sims Into SharePoint

Richard — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:35:33 +0000

I now have a way to script bulk loading of photos from Sims into SharePoint, for example to enable the use of the Learning Gateway My Children web part.

The script is in 2 parts. First extract the photos from Sims using our free Photo Export tool

PhotoExport.exe simsuser simspassword outputFolder /names:mapping.csv

where mapping.csv is a csv file mapping admission numbers to Active Directory login names

The use the PowerShell script in my last blog entry Using PowerShell to Bulk Upload Files to SharePoint to upload the images to SharePoint.

You could even set up a scheduled task to automatically upload them on a predefined schedule.

Updated Sims Photo Export Utility – Choose image format, Save as Different Name

Richard — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:23:36 +0000

I’ve updated the free Sims Photo Extract Utility to have the following extra functionality:

Choose image format to save as
Ability to read a csv list of names to save images as. Useful for example if you want to save the images with their network login name – you would just have to provide a csv linking their Admission Number to login name
Display list of years if an invalid year is passed

Details of how to use these are detailed in the README.txt file and by running PhotoExport /?.

I’ve also fixed a bug where the wrong extension was used in some circumstances.

You can download the updated version from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/utilities.html.

Updated Free Photo Export From Sims

Richard — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:04:58 +0000

I’ve uploaded a updated version of the free photo export from Sims utility. There are 2 changes:

Option to save the photos named as the internal sims ID rather than Admission Number and Staff Code. Run PhotoExport /? for help on how to do this.
It now handles the cases where the Staff Code contains characters which are not valid characters for a file name. It replaces these characters with –.

You can download the utility from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/utilities.html.

Hiding Disabled Users in Active Directory Groups on the SLK Assignment Properties Page

RichardWillis — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:51:35 +0000

I’ve just finished updating SLK for a UK school who had problems with learners disabled in Active Directory showing when they were assigning work through SLK. Firstly, I must say that this is a solution for a particular problem that they had and isn’t really a general purpose solution. If a learner is disabled, you should really be displaying them so you can assign then work. They may only be disabled temporarily, e.g. as puishment for computer misuse, but will still need to do the work when they are re-enabled.

The situation this school was in, is that they are running the Sims Learning Gateway (SLG). Part of how that works is that there is a component to create AD users and class groups based on the data in Sims. However, the users created by SLG are then ‘consolidated’ with the ‘real’ AD users, so these can then use the Sims web parts. As part of the consolidation process, the SLG users are disabled and the real users are added to the class groups, however the disabled SLG users are not removed from the AD groups.

Now the school were using these AD groups to assign SLK Learner permisssion to in order to assign work. So when the teachers came to assign work and selected their class group, each pupil was represented twice in the list which was a bit confusing.

The solution was to update the SLK code so that there is now a setting to hide disabled users. This will mean that when SLK goes to get the list of all Learners on a site it will ignore users in Active Directory groups who are disabled.

To get this set up you will first of all need to download and upgrade to the version with the setting in on the 1.3.2 build page . Then set the setting by:

Go to the Configure SharePoint Learning Kit page in SharePoint Central Administration.
Make sure that the correct site collection is selected and then click ‘Click here to download the current SLK Settings file’ near the bottom of the page.
This will open up the SlkSettings.xml file in a new browser window. Save this to disk.
Open the saved file in a text editor e.g. notepad (do not use Word or similar)
Add the attribute HideDisabledUsers=”true” to the file as indicated in the screen-shot

6. Then upload the modified SlkSettings.xml file by adding it the page to “New SlkSettings file:” and clicking OK.

This will work for schools using Sims Learning Gateway with the same issues, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for anyone else. My personal preference is to give the individual users the appropriate permissions on the class sites rather than using groups. Groups will always cause issues when it comes to rollover and I just think it’s cleaner and more intuitive to have the direct permissions. I would also have removed the disabled users from the groups. Of course I’ve got the toolset to do all of this easily.

Automatically linking Moodle to Sims.Net and Facility CMIS

RichardWillis — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:14:50 +0000

I’m regularly asked about whether it’s possible to link Moodle to school MIS systems. There’s a number of ways to link Moodle to Sims.Net or Facility CMIS, both open source and commercial and here’s a summary of the ones I know about. If you know of any others, or feel I’ve missed some information out, please let me know and I’ll add them.

Open Source

CLEO MIS Upload Tool

The CLEO tool was originally developed by Dan Poltawski for the CLEO Regional Broadband Consortium. It’s not a fully automatic tool as you need to create a csv file from your MIS system first. It then simplifies the process of creating users and courses from the data. Once the tool has been run, changes in Sims/Facility CMIS are not automatically reflected in Moodle. I think that if you re-export the data and re-run the tool it will update the courses, but I’m not sure about that. This tool will run with any MIS system you can export csv files from. Suport is via the Moodle forums notably this thread.

The Definitive Guide to SIMS.net, Moodle and LDAP Integration by Penfold_99

Penfold_99 is a highly active EduGeek member who has posted documentation and scripts on how to link Moodle to Sims. The documentation can be found on the Moodle Docs site. It consists of VB scripts to populate Active Directory from Sims, and then a number of scripts to create views in the Sims database so that the enable external database setting for creating courses can be used. It also includes a module to show the timetable from Sims within Moodle. Penfold_99 has given a lot of support on the Edugeek forums around setting it up, for example this thread. This is an automatic solution as Moodle is looking directly at the Sims database. The AD provisioning is run as a scheduled task. You don’t need to use the AD provisioning, but you do need a pupil identifier (their UPN) in a certain field in AD as the integration depends on using Active Directory authorisation in Moodle.

There’s now a sticky thread on this on Edugeek http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/28487-definitive-guide-sims-net-moodle-ldap-integration.html.

Guy Thomas’s Facility to Moodle Integration Block

Guy Thomas from the Ossett School has developed a Moodle block to integrate Moodle with Facility CMIS. It allows the bulk creation of pupil and parent accounts, and also a teacher to add Facility CMIS teaching groups a Moodle course. The initial creation of accounts is done manually through the Moodle front-end as it is a Moodle block, but there are then scheduled tasks to keep the pupil, parents and teaching group membership synchronised. The documentation it comes with looks good and Guy provides support via the Moodle forums. It does require initial preparation of Active Directory and your existing Moodle accounts to ensure that they all have the Facility CMIS Student ID in to make sure Moodle knows which user is which in Facility.

Commercial

Salamander Moodle from SalamanderSoft

I’m obviously biased about this one. It will automatically create student, staff and parent accounts from the data in your MIS system (Sims, Facility CMIS, Phoenix, Integris, any csv file or database I can figure out the schema for). It will also create courses based on your criteria, if you can describe it I should be able to do it e.g. course per teaching group or course per subject year combination with teaching groups as Moodle groups. The provisioning is run as scheduled tasks so not quite live. I update the database directly, so if there’s other items you’d like doing I should be able to figure it out.

Which should I go for?

That’s entirely up to you and what you want out of the integration. The advantages of the Open Source solutions are that the cash price is £0 and you are contributing to the community by using them. The downside is that it can take a long time to get them working in your network and you are reliant on the goodwill, inclination and availability of the writers for support (so far the support from all the above open source tools looks pretty good). For commercial solutions, it’s pretty much the opposite, it’s going to cost you money, but will take less of your time sorting it out and the commercial company will be responsible for making sure it works and keeps working.

Export Photos from Sims

RichardWillis — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:37:03 +0000

After seeing a post on Edugeek, I’ve knocked up a quick utility to extract pupil and staff photos from Sims. It might be useful to you if you need to use them elsewhere, but you do have to bear in mind who owns the copyright, which might limit what you can do with them.

More details at http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/utilities.html.

Sims Learning Gateway Profile Details Web Part

RichardWillis — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:20:33 +0000

I recently helped a customer install the Sims Profile Details Web Part. I actually became aware of his problem after spotting his post on Edugeek. It looked like it would be quite simple to solve and as he was an existing customer, even though I had nothing to do with his SLG I offered to help.

From the description it looked like the web part needed a property stating the spell check page set before it could be displayed. In fact the web part errored so badly that the whole page could not display and you had to go to the web part maintenance page to remove it before you could view it again. I knocked up a quick utility to instantiate the web part, set the appropriate property and then add it to the page. It took a bit of time to get the configuration settings exactly right – at one point I had it appearing above the page title!, but when I got them right it went straight on.

One of the reasons I wanted to help out, was that the next piece of work for Salamander SharePoint is to add and maintain web parts. This was a great proof of concept for adding web parts to a page, and I’ve now got it integrated into the core product.