The competition came about following ESS’ abrupt move to put barriers in place earlier this year to prevent the use of SQL backups by claiming this amounts to a breach of its contract terms and IP. ESS has suggested two alternative methods to SQL backups – using APIs and the ESS Report Writer – but neither provide enough data for a successful data migration, and using the ESS Report Writer to migrate data would be very cumbersome and time consuming. Bromcom’s competition invited IT professionals to find ways to extract key data that clearly is not possible to extract using either of the approved methods. Bromcom initially offered a £1000 reward to whoever could extract sufficient data to enable a data migration to another MIS.
Bromcom identified three specific problems that needed to be solved by the entrants: the reporting engine is not able to export the SIMS lookup tables, certain fields are not available for export, and very little secondary school specific data can be extracted. The competition was shared on LinkedIn and the IT forum EduGeek in early July and received a number of entries over the course of the month.
Although no entrants were able to find a way to extract enough data for a migration to a new MIS, many did make suggestions as to the kind of approach that could be used to extract data from SIMS via the ESS Report Writer, and they were selected as the winners of the competition.
The competition foremost helped to highlight to all that migrating the entire data set SIMS to an alternative MIS according to ESS’ rules is impossible.
Following the close of the competition, Bromcom decided to realign the rules because no one was able to solve the challenge and therefore ‘win’. The prize pot was expanded to £5000 and split between four winners who entered via EduGeek, and the individual prizes were given to a nominated charity or school of the winners’ choice.
The winners were as follows:
- Marci for the automated processing of PDF exports using Power Automate
- Dhicks for their parsed PDF file concept
- Steve21 for getting coded behaviour outputs with the report generator
- Vikpaw for their lookup queries through the SIMS API
The winners nominated a number of charities and educational establishments to receive the donations including:
- The Christie NHS Foundation Trust
- Knightsbridge School Education Foundation
- Folly Wildlife Rescue
Bromcom firmly believes it’s unacceptable that schools with SIMS do not have full access to their data backups when offboarding. Schools have still been migrating to different MIS systems using SQL backups despite ESS’ claims. You can learn more about why you should feel confident switching to Bromcom here.
Ali Guryel, Managing Director of Bromcom, commented: “We set up this competition to demonstrate the barrier schools have when ESS have schools’ SIMS SQL databases and hence the barrier schools have to easily switch MIS. What we found is that ESS has not provided their customers with a viable switching process, and is yet again forcing them to stay on a solution they don’t want to be on. We are fully committed to striving for an EdTech market where schools do not have any barriers to change, and suppliers have a fair competition and fair procurement experience.”