Product Release Webinar

As schools draw to a close for the summer the agile development process here at Bromcom just keeps rolling.

I was pleased to attend our latest product release webinar to show our customers the developments that will be coming in the next release. I have already blogged before about these fantastic events. When I was a customer it was important that I attended these sessions, not only to see what was coming next, but also to offer suggestion on what the next steps should be. Steve, Ben and Richard, our Product Owners, are always happy work directly with our customers to take on board praise and also suggestions for future releases.

As well as the live audience, here at Bromcom we know it is important to reach as may of our customers with these types of events. We offer access to a recording of the Webinar and our release notes are also available from the documentation centre. But I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the key areas that have been developed in this release.

We developed the main dashboards to make it easier for individual users to customise what they can see. This allows you to have information about your school directly at your fingertips, but more importantly you can customise what information is being shown in relation to your role.

We have continued with the ongoing development of our user interface to maximise use experience. We continue to keep the screens clear of options and make use of dropdown menus to allow one click filtering to take place.

There has also been some great developments with our Ad-Hoc Reporting. You now no longer need to spend ages designing a report, instant access to data with minimal effort has now been enhanced with the option of calculated columns being drawn directly from the live data such as attendance information of summary attainment data. I think this will be my new go-to screen for reporting from now on.

We have also been working hard to integrate the Bromcom system with other third-party school-based products and this release allows Bromcom to integrate with G-Suite. You can provision users and classes and lots of other cool features directly from within you MIS environment. Our Office 365 integration should be with us by the end of the summer.

Not that I’m always thinking about my stomach, but a great development in this release is the implementation of dinner menus. You can set up your dinner choices in conjunction with payment and allow parents through our parent portal My Child at School to be able to select which meals they would like to have at school. This fully customisable feature allows for you as the school to set up cut-off times for selection, rolling menu rotas and reports for the kitchen. All great stuff.

Our Headline Dashboard has been improved to help you report this year’s exam results. As you move into the new academic year, you will be able to associate KS4 assessments to see progress that has taken place across the whole two years.

We continue to improve our homework functionality and areas shown within the demonstration were quizzes and assignments. You can also clone assignments for other teachers within your team to customise and deploy to their classes.

The view of homework from the student Portal has also been improved.

From a MAT point of view, we are starting some major changes with our MAT Vision product that aggregates data from across the schools in your trust into one single and more importantly reportable database. Our Covid-19 dashboard that has been available at a school level is now coming to Vision so you will be able to see statistics from across the whole of your trust.

We are also starting to implement new dashboards to bring vision in line with the Cloud MIS product. These screens will allow MAT leaders to easily see all your trust data in a clear and easy to use format. Further developments with Vision will be happening over the summer regarding being able to write back to the individual schools and also being able to customise access rights to specific areas of the vision system. I look forward to blogging about theses when they are released.

It was a bit of a mammoth session, but with so many fantastic improvements it needed to be. I left the session knowing that with each release and upgrade Bromcom truly provides a first-class MIS system to schools and MATs of any phase.