Feed Schedule – SIMS schools only

This tab allows you to adjust the feed schedule.

If you want to send attendance feeds more frequently than daily, you can enter a comma-separated list of times, format hh:mm in the “Daily schedule” column.

You can run feeds manually by clicking the “Run now” buttons. You can force these feeds to be sent whether they contain changed data or not by checking the “Upload the feeds even if they are unchanged” checkbox. (The dates next to the “Attendance: Registration” and “Attendance: Lesson” feeds are used only when you click the “Run Now” buttons.)

**If your school haven't bought the GO 4 Schools attendance module we recommend specifying a daily schedule for the 'Attendance Summary' feed to run before midnight, whereas all other feeds should ideally run after 1am.

Feed Schedule – All Other MIS’s

As we will connect with your MIS using a different mechanism, you should disable the MIS feed checkboxes. This tab will configure your staff and student feeds to create login accounts based on your Active Directory information.

You can run these feeds manually by clicking the “Run now” buttons. You can force these feeds to be sent whether they contain changed data or not by checking the “Upload the feeds even if they are unchanged” checkbox.

Connectivity Settings

HTTP – This is the more reliable option to send data. Once enabled it will be the primary method of sending feeds to us and if it fails the feed system will try and send the feeds via SMTP.

SMTP - You must provide values for the "SMTP Server Name" “Port” and "From Address". If your SMTP server does not allow anonymous access, you will need to provide the Username and Password too.

You can test connectivity using the “Test SMTP Settings”. This will identify potential problems with ports blocked by firewalls.

Assuming that connectivity is OK, you can test that emails can be sent by entering an email address in the "Send email to:" box and then clicking the "Send" button. We strongly recommend testing the system by sending a test email to an account outside the school, e.g. to a webmail account such as Hotmail or Google Mail. This will reveal any problems with mail relaying which may not be apparent if you use an internal school email address.

MIS Settings - SIMS

You should choose the appropriate MIS from the menu at the top of this tab and then complete all input fields that are shown.

If your school uses SIMS, enter the username and password of an account that has “Design Report” permissions. See page 5 of this guide.

SIMS installed at: location of SIMS on your server (you may need to map the drive if SIMS is on a different server)

Update SIMS with GO 4 Schools reports by clicking "Re-import Report Definitions" This typically takes a few minutes. If it happens almost instantly, it is most likely that the import has failed due to incorrect credentials. (See Checking the Feed System below.)

Enable to use CONNECT.INI which should be in the ‘SIMS installed at’ path. In the case of a redirect, move the file into the path provided in this tab. Alternatively enter the SIMS server name and database name explicitly.

Ensure the contents of CONNECT.INI file have these appended at the bottom:

CommandTimeout=1000000 

[Reports] 

MaxNumberOfTableJoins=900 Timeout=10000000

MIS Settings – All Other MIS’s

“No MIS” must be selected from the MIS Settings tab.

MIS Settings – Active Directory (AD)

If the Active Directory (AD) is on a separate domain to that of the server where the tool is installed, then a second installation of the Feed System will need to be run on the AD server and “No MIS” must be selected from the MIS Settings tab.

User Accounts

If you use Active Directory (AD), you should select the names of security groups (NOT organisational units) in the "Staff Groups" and "Student Groups" inputs. You can check that the Feed System can extract a list of members for a group by clicking the "Test retrieval" button. The security group or groups selected will be displayed first the next time you launch the feed system

If you don’t use AD you can choose the “Text file” option and then select the text file that contains user details. See “Active Directory versus a text file for user accounts” below. 

Data Security

This tab allows you to set up the encryption for the Feed System.

The values for School Code, School Name and Private Key should be copied from the "Manage > System > Feed Settings" page on the GO 4 Schools website.

A link to the page can be seen in the left-hand navigational area in the screenshot below.

Private Keys: You must use the 2048-bit private key for the GDPR compliance feed tool (version 2.3.0 and higher) and 1024-bit private key for pre-GDPR feed tool (version 2.2.7 and lower)

If you use SIMS you can use the ‘Remove Specific data’ fields to exclude specific students, parent email addresses and student attributes from being extracted from your MIS. Use commas to separate multiple values. Note: Please let us know which data field names you want to exclude from your MIS, as the formatting of these fields is very specific.

For all other MIS’s if you have any issues regarding data access please contact the support team. You can do this via the support ticket system (Help & technical support->Create a support ticket)

Scheduled Tasks

This tab allows you to specify an account to use other than "NT Authority\System" for running scheduled tasks in Windows.

You will need to grant “Modify” file system access to the account specified here to the following locations:
 1) The installation directory, e.g. “c:\Program Files\Hyperspheric Solutions Ltd\GO 4 Schools\”

2) The location used for the temporary files, as specified on this tab.

3) “Read” access to the SIMS installation directory if you are using SIMS.

Attendance Module

This section is only applicable to schools who have subscribed to the Attendance Module Tier 2 or 3 (which writes session data back to SIMS).

Enable Pull – This should be enabled during the second remote session with the GO 4 Schools Support Team.

Webservice URL should be present by default. If not then enter the following:-

https://www.go4schools.com/interface/SIMS/SIMSService.asmx

Schedule: We recommend the first run of the day is 05:00 am to pick up all of the previous day’s changes. The other scheduled run times can be chosen by the school, however we find the following pattern works well; immediately after AM and PM registers are closed, then again 60 minutes after these times.

To get the Launch.STARS.SIMS.App button to display you need to navigate away from the Attendance Module and then select the Attendance Module Tab with the shift key held down.

This is used in both the first and second remote sessions with the GO 4 Schools Support Team to set up the Tier 2 and 3 Attendance Modules.

Attendance Module Launch.STARS.SIMS.App

This section is only applicable to schools who have subscribed to the Attendance Module Tier 2 and 3.

SIMS

Username, Password, Server and Database will all be pulled from the MIS Settings Tab.

Webservice : HttpProxy – Address, Username and Password will all be pulled from the Connectivity Settings Tab.

During the remote session with the GO 4 Schools Support Team the following five buttons will be used to test that the connectivity between SIMS and GO 4 Schools is operational.

[SIMS]Check Login – Used to check that the connection to SIMS functions correctly.

[SIMS]Get Student XML – Checks that the Student information can be read from SIMS.

[SIMS]Get Att. Dates – Get attendance Dates from SIMS.

[SIMS]Get Special marks – Get the Special Marks from SIMS.

See the section “SPECIAL TYPES OF MARK AND YOUR MIS” in the Attendance Module Guide.

[GO] WS Echo – Used to check that the attendance module can talk to the GO 4 Schools Server.

The final three buttons will also be used to write the attendance marks to SIMS.

Update special marks

[Go] Get session xml

Execute full pipeline