Independent School Management Information System

[BrightMauveLion]

Which is the best MIS for independent schools? We are currently looking at Bromcom, Arbor and iSams.

I’ve only used iSams and it’s brilliant, all encompassing and fairly easy to use.

I’ve never heard anyone say a good word about Bromcom. We use Arbor and I really like it. We’re a state school, but I don’t know why that would make any real difference.

iSams is not brilliant in my opinion. It's not easy to use and some basic tasks are much more difficult to perform compared to Sims. (Which isn't that impressive itself!)

Arbor is complete shite. I work in an excellent state school that moved from SIMs to Arbor. It is awful.

I used iSams a few years ago and it was similar to SIMs, i.e. ok but nothing special.

Isams is very adaptable, but can be unintuitive.

iSams is awful! We got out of our contract with them on the grounds that it couldn’t actually do what they told us it could during the tender process.

it might be okay for private as we were told it was originally designed for that sector.

@EverythingElseIsTaken what sector are you from and what couldn’t isams do?

I’m in state sector. The system couldn’t integrate with our dinner money system, it couldn’t integrate with the text system we used (they had definitely said it could do this- it was a requirement on the tender docs), it couldn’t upload photos done by the school photographer as they were based on UPNs which iSams doesn’t like (to their credit the help team did try but they couldn’t do it either), reports that I previously ran daily from SIMS couldn’t be done in iSams - they offered to create the report for us for an extra fee. A lot of things were “oh yes that is coming soon” but didn’t come in two years!

Some things were a slight improvement on SIMS but not enough to make keeping iSams worthwhile.
Switching from iSams to any other MIS is a nightmare because of the weird mapping they use - a lot of data just needed to be manually copied.