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Welcome to SIMS Next Gen, with Scomis as your guide

Scomis, as a front runner in #EdTech (education technology) is at the forefront of introducing SIMS Next Gen.

Our customers will have access to SIMS Next Gen from the start of the Autumn 2022 term.

Scomis & SIMS Next Gen

Scomis’ relationship with ESS has been decades long. This means we’ve had the privilege of contributing to the development of this exciting new version of SIMS.

We’re looking forward to sharing SIMS Next Gen with you, and with all our customers and future customers. We will be rolling out SIMS NextGen, in easy steps, from September 2022.

Starting your SIMS Next Gen journey with Scomis

SIMS Next Gen will be rolled out over the next three years in what ESS are calling ‘slices.’ You’ll hear the term ‘slices’ a lot in the future.

What are SIMS Next Gen slices?

Slices are discrete pieces of functionality, that work in harmony with SIMS7.

We know it’s hard to imagine how this will work, so here’s a half-decent analogy.

SIMS cakes

Imagine you’ve got a whole SIMS 7 cake, perhaps a Victoria sponge. This is your current SIMS.

And now imagine a Next Gen cake – a splendid chocolate cake.

Now slice out the tiniest sliver from your SIMS 7 Victoria Sponge, and replace it with the tiniest sliver of SIMS Next Gen chocolate cake. You’ve still got a whole cake, but now a tiny slice of it is chocolate cake instead of Victoria sponge. Or, in SIMS terms, you’ve still got all the functionality of SIMS, but a piece of it is now Next Gen instead of SIMS 7.

The first SIMS slice

The first slice is ‘Take Register,’ and that’s coming for Primary schools in September 2022.

Why come on the SIMS Next Gen journey with Scomis?

Each slice, starting with Take Register, is designed to add value to our SIMS customers by saving time, by improving the user interface so it’s intuitive to use, and by carefully complementing the rest of SIMS’ functionality.

Expect a steady transformation, slice by slice, over the coming months and years.

How will Scomis make our SIMS Next Gen journey easy?

The Scomis team are here to guide you and support you through the transformation, every step of the way.

This starts with some technical work that we’ll do in the background.

This will be followed by webinars from our School Partners to show you around each new slice, so it feels familiar and welcome to you.

We’ll tell you more about the upcoming webinars in our regular Newsletters.

And you can find out more about SIMS Next Gen from ESS here.

What’s the next step?

We will be in touch with every customer during the SIMS Next Gen journey so that we can fully support you in accessing the new slices as they’re ready. We’ll also let you know the prerequisites within your SIMS data to ensure you’re Next Gen-ready.

For our hosted customers, we will also need some permissions from you to enable us to make the process super-easy for you.

What about SIMS 7?

Happily, SIMS 7 continues to be a focus for development at ESS, in parallel with Next Gen. There are some excellent updates in the Summer Upgrade. We’ll run a webinar on the Summer Upgrade in July and we’ll let you know about this in our regular newsletter and on social media.

My establishment isn’t a Scomis Hosted Application customer, what about us?

We’ll be in touch with you too in July and August. We’ll share the documents that you will need to follow in order to be ready for SIMS Next Gen. Or you can contact your Account Manager and ask to switch to Scomis Hosted Application Service and we’ll take all that pain away from you.

In short

  • SIMS Next Gen is coming in September
  • Scomis have contributed to its development
  • Scomis is going to help you switch painlessly as each slice arrives
  • Scomis is here to support and guide you, as always
  • SIMS 7 continues to be improved by ESS and supported by Scomis

And we’ll be in touch in July and August 2022.