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SIMS the MIS of choice supporting teachers, senior leaders and wider staff with the tools to efficiently drive improvement in their schools.
A typical partner application will integrate with SIMS by making use of a copy of SIMS .Net workstation. This installation is required either to enable the use of the command reporter tools or to work against SIMS Business Objects.
Often partner applications run on machines that are not typically used as SIMS workstations and this may result in the version of SIMS becoming out of date. Regularly used SIMS workstations would be automatically updated; SIMS provides a system called SOLUS which keeps these up to date.
As of February 2012, most schools use SOLUS 2 to upgrade workstations automatically. About 10% of schools have upgraded to our new system SOLUS 3. There will be a point in time when we move all customers to the latest version but this is at least 6 months away. From a partner perspective, their requirement is simply that the version of SIMS on the machine(s) running their software is kept up to date. ‘SOLUS 3’ actually makes this process easier.
On a SIMS File server there will be a folder S:\SIMS\Setups where all SIMS installers are held. The location of the setups folder can be read from <Windir>\SIMS.INI
[Setup]
SIMSDirectory=S:\SIMSSIMS
SetupsDirectory=S:\SIMS\Setups
SIMSDotNetDirectory=C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net…The main SIMS Application is Pulsar.exe. The short cuts to SIMS on standard workstations use a bootstrap application, SIMSLOAD.exe which:
SIMSLOAD optionally takes the name and folder for the required application to run:
SIMSLOAD “c:\program files (x86)\sims\sims .net\pulsar.exe”
Or can be run without a parameter to simply check for upgrades
SIMSLOAD
This mechanism is sometimes used as a scheduled task to balance out upgrade loads on the system.
Some partner systems make use of SIMSLoad to keep SIMS updated.
‘SOLUS 3’ doesn’t actually remove any of the folders or applications above but works in a very different way.
‘SOLUS 3’ requires that the school has a SOLUS agent installed on all SIMS boxes, servers, workstations and partner boxes.
‘SOLUS 3’ has a deployment management server within the system where the system manager in effect decides what the function of a machine is and for the purposes of a partner’s server would need this to be configured as a SIMS workstation and thereafter it would be automatically updated. In effect the partner simply needs to tell the school that their box must be configured as a SIMS workstation in SOLUS3 and that’s about it.
The SIMS\Setups folder is not deleted BUT it is no longer updated by SOLUS 3.
Any partner application that accessed the SIMS\Setups folder directly and ran SIMSApplicationSetup.exe automatically would downgrade SIMS on that box.
Any partner application running SIMSLOAD on a box without the SOLUS 3 agent would downgrade the box.
Any partner application running SIMSLOAD on a box running the SOLUS 3 agent would have no effect on the system.
If partners require further information about the impacts of SOLUS 3 on their applications, please contact support as usual.
Or via Support Net