Academic Year Change 2021 Webinar Recordings and Status Viewer Update

At the end of June, and early July, we ran 4 webinars covering key areas of the change in Academic Year and how this impacts your Salamander Integration Suite Processes. Recordings of these events are now available. Our Status Viewer application has also received an update and includes some features to aid in the Academic Year change.

Webinar Recordings

At the end of June, and early July, we ran 4 webinars covering key areas of the change in Academic Year.
Recordings and queries following these sessions are now available.

For Schools that use Microsoft Teams 

Teams via School Data Sync – what, where, when and how (Fri 25th June, 10am)

The queries received in this webinar were as follows:

Q: When should iSAMS customers Enable/Disable their SDS processes ready for “iSAMS Rollover”?
A: SDS processes should be disabled before the timetable change. If you then log a case with our support team, we can make the necessary changes to support the new classes being correctly prefixed with the following academic year and create a new profile. We recommend setting the profile expiry each year to the date prior to the planned date of iSAMS Rollover. 

Q: If you want to be able to use the same Teams from last year, what options do you have? For example, two year classes at GCSE or A level, can the same Team be used for both Year 10/11 and 12/13.
A: For this, you will need a new sync profile each year. When completing the end of year processes in School Data Sync, do not choose the “Archive” option as this will make them read only.

For Schools that use Google Classroom 

Google Classroom – What you need to know about classroom access (Fri 25th June, 2pm)

No queries were received in this webinar 

For Schools where we create Users 

Users – Your new intake and staff, and what happens to Leavers (Fri 2nd July, 10am)
In this webinar, we also discussed what happens to groups we manage in Active Directory for Forms and Classes.

We received one query during this webinar which was:

Q: If you have two or more pupils in the same year group with the same name, how would their usernames be handled?
A: There are a number of ways this can be managed to support your needs. Common solutions are to use extra characters from the users forename (where using initial and surname), or adding a counter on the end of the username.

For Schools where we process Timetables to User Calendars 

Calendars – Your 2021 timetable (Fri 2nd July, 2pm)

We received one query during this webinar which was:

Q: We have extra categories in staff’s calendars that we would like to remove. Is there a way we can do this?

A: Our processes can be filtered to handle these kinds of requests via our support team. 

Status Viewer Utility Update

Our Status Viewer utility has been available for a little over 2 years now, and we have recently added several features to it. A full overview of the utility and details of the update can be found here Status Viewer Information (salamandersoft.co.uk)

If you don’t have this utility and would like to have it added, our Support Team can add this for you.