GO 4 Schools is a web application – developed by and running on servers managed by Hyperspheric Solutions Ltd - that provides staff, students and parents with online access to markbooks, reports, attendance data etc.


The GO 4 Schools Feed System ("The Feed System") consists of software components that are installed within your school. These components periodically extract data from your school's MIS and then send that data, in an encrypted form, to the GO 4 Schools servers. One of the components is a Configuration Tool which provides a user interface for you to configure the Feed System for your school.


This document describes how to install and configure the Feed System. If you have all of the information required for the installation in place before you start, the installation should take less than 30 minutes.


Installation pre-requisites

It is recommended that you install the Feed System on a server computer that is left running 24 hours a day. The following must be installed before the feed system is installed. If they are not, you will need to uninstall and reinstall the feed system to pick up the changes.

  • The server onto which you are installing the Feed System must have Microsoft .Net Framework 4.7.1 and later installed.
  • If your school uses SIMS, the server must have the SIMS client software installed on it as the Feed System extracts data from SIMS by running SIMS reports.
  • The server on which the Feed System is to be installed must be able to send email via SMTP to the outside world, specifically to email addresses for the following two domains: hyperfeeds.com, hyperspheric.com. The MX record for the hyperfeeds.com domain is hyperfeeds-com.mail.eo.outlook.com. You may want to test connectivity using the techniques described here: Use Telnet to test SMTP communication on Exchange servers.
    Experience indicates that this pre-requisite is the one most prone to cause issues during installation.
  • The Feed System is installed as a medium priority application on the server, higher priority applications may take precedence over resource usage in turn disrupting the feed harvesting process. To circumvent this, we advise schools to ensure the server has enough memory to spare in case multiple jobs are running at the same time.  

Compatibility

  • Microsoft Windows: The Feed System has been tested on Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Microsoft Windows Client versions, 7, 8 and 10
  • SIMS connectivity has been tested with SIMS version 7.124 upwards

Information required for installation

  • The DNS name of an SMTP server that can be used to send feeds from the school. This may be a school mail server, e.g. a Microsoft Exchange server, or a webmail server for a service such as Gmail or Office 365.
  • A school email address that can be used as the "from" address for emails sent by the Feed System.
  • Credentials of an account that can be used to send emails via the SMTP server. (These are required only if the SMTP server does not allow anonymous access.)
  • The name of a security group or set of security groups in Active Directory to which staff belong but students do not. Note, these need to be security groups, not organisational units. If you don’t use Active Directory for staff accounts, the Feed System can be configured to extract accounts from a text file – see below for details of the format required.
  • The name of a security group or set of security groups in Active Directory to which students belong but staff do not. Note, these need to be security groups, not organisational units. If you don’t use Active Directory for student accounts, the Feed System can be configured to extract accounts from a text file – see below for details of the format required.
  • The configuration tool creates scheduled tasks which will be run using the “NT Authority\System” account by default. If you want to use a different account, we will need the credentials of a Windows account that can be used to run scheduled tasks. This account will need to have the User Right “Log on as a batch job” – please check the documentation appropriate for your version of Windows for information on how to ensure the account has this right.

MIS specific instructions

  • If your school uses SIMS you will need to have available the username and password for a SIMS account to be used to import and run reports, and this will be input into the configuration tool. Please ensure the account has the roles:
    Administration Assistant
    Class Teacher
    Personnel Assistant
    TPsuperuser

    in order for us to access all of the information needed for GO 4 Schools.
  • If your school uses Bromcom the feed system installed at your school will access Active Directory only to get login accounts for staff and students. Please provide the GO 4 Schools support team with your Bromcom school id and a username and password, with access granted for GO 4 Schools (may be registered as Hyperspheric Solutions) and we will connect directly with Bromcom.
  • For all other MIS's the feed system installed at your school will access Active Directory only to get login accounts for staff and students. We'll extract your MIS data via the third party company Wonde who specialise in MIS connectivity. Please provide the GO 4 Schools support team with a name, email address and phone number for a contact at the school who has administrator rights for the MIS, and Wonde will make contact with you directly.