Benefits of the Scomis Hosted Application Service

Do you spend valuable time and money trying to keep your Management Information System up to date?

Our Hosted Application Service removes the burden of managing SIMS onsite with school based servers, so you don’t need to worry about upgrades, patching, backups or keeping server software up to date – we take care of that for you remotely, with no disruption to your school day. What’s more, you don’t need the latest hardware and you can access your data securely from anywhere with an internet connection!

Key Features – the service includes the following:
– Seamless, Secure and Flexible Access – you can access SIMS at any time using a range of devices – whether in school, at home or anywhere with an internet connection.
– Our service enables you to meet the growing demand to provide access to SIMS from home, promoting flexible working and a good work life balance for your users.
– Our data security features mean access can be provided outside school without compromising requirements for the safeguarding of sensitive information.
– Federated Access – Multi School Academy Trusts and Federations welcome!
– Hassle Free Upgrades – we take care of the upgrades and patches for you. Capita release three upgrades per year and a number of patches throughout the year. These can be disruptive to deploy and distract your staff from making the best use of SIMS in their working day.
– Scomis apply upgrades out of hours – usually after 5pm on a Friday and customers are given plenty of notice so there is minimum disruption to your users.
– Scomis test all new releases to ensure any initial bugs are found and resolved. This means that once deployed you can be confident of a seamless transition for the school.
– Hardware/Software Updates – reduce the burden by hosting with Scomis. Maintaining your own infrastructure can be a costly exercise. If you have locally hosted SIMS you will need to migrate to the latest versions of SOLUS and SQL on a regular basis – service providers are likely to charge to perform these migrations for you. You may also need to upgrade or replace your existing server and workstation hardware and devices.
– We will become responsible for server related software licencing such as SQL.
– You will reduce your server hardware requirement and extend the life of your workstations utilising our hosted solution.
– Off site Backup – we take care of your data so your staff can concentrate on getting the most out of it.
– Scomis value and protect our customers’ data by having proven and reliable processes in place.
– Every night we backup your SIMS database and regularly validate that this was successful. We can restore daily data up to the last 30 days and rolled up monthly data for the previous 5 months allowing a full 6 month recovery.
– Built-in Resilience – giving you extra peace of mind. Your data is held on our enterprise class datacentre at Great Moor House in Exeter. The data is also mirrored to a remote site within Devon County Council so if anything happens to our servers you can rest assured that your data is still safe.
– Third Party Application Integration – trouble free integration with SIMS. You may well be using a number of applications that integrate with SIMS. Our solution ensures that the links between these applications and SIMS continue to work once your data has been moved to us. An automated installation creates a secure connection between Scomis and your site enabling a transparent operation with all 3rd party SIMS integrated applications.
– Our service can transform the way multi-school operations work by providing access to each school data set through one secure logon, enabling your users to work from any site. This includes finance where we also host FMS with multiple database options and have additional services to host PS Financials and Corero accounting applications.
– SIMS in the Classroom – made easy! Embedding SIMS in the classroom can cost your school in terms of managing the applications on workstations and with some hosting providers you will even incur a per user charge. Our pricing includes access for as many users as you need, including all teachers!
– Creating new users is a trouble free operation managed by your staff – no helpdesk call required!
– High Levels of Availability – you can be confident that our solution is robust.
– Performance against our KPIs is regularly published for our customers and the service is generally available 24/7. Our target is to ensure that hosted applications are available to you 99% or more between 8.00am and 6:00pm during term time. Last year we achieved 99.93% availability – in industry significantly higher premiums would be chargeable for these levels of availability.
– Superior User Experience – we aim to provide the best user experience. From our seamless connector that is used to access the service through to provision for federated schools, we aim to provide the best user experience.
– We are also able to offer instant remote support without the need to download any additional tools so that our Service Desk can quickly access your desktop and work on your issue with you.
– More than 10 Years of Investment – you can be confident that our solution is robust.
– We have developed our hosted solution for over 10 years and have a programme of continual investment to ensure performance is maximised and to keep up to date with market developments.