Good morning,

We’ve had a very busy term. We’ve helped several hundred new customers set up and run their parents’ evenings with us, since the start of the academic year. We’ve visited Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Edinburgh, North Lanarkshire and West Lothian Councils to run group training sessions for their schools. We’ve started work on some new bolt-on applications which will help schools with other tasks that needed an electronic/web solution (more on that in due course) and of course we’ve been developing our little hearts out, as ever, to ensure that customers receive the most functional, best developed and most innovative parents’ evening solution available. Why? Because we invented online booking for parents’ evenings, and we’re dedicated to changing how they’re run, for the betterment of all involved.

The software ‘build’ we’ll be launching next features some nice changes, including being able to add parents to existing students more easily (helpful for schools whose database doesn’t provide both parents automatically), some mobile user-interface updates, to help parents make their bookings more easily, and perhaps most impressively, an artificial intelligence system, built in collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University, that helps schools set up parents’ evenings with confidence that they’ve not made a mistake in their new event’s chosen settings.

Soon we’ll be adding a single sign-on (SSO) integration for Firefly Learning‘s virtual learning environment (VLE), so that schools who utilise this extremely impressive school learning tool will be able to have their parents login and make parents’ evening appointments seamlessly, without need for a username or password.

We’ve also finished work on integration with three of Groupcall’s products, such as Messenger (schools who use this can track the messages their parents send to parents, and have those messages come from Groupcall directly), Xpressions (messages will go to parents via push notification, and parents can login and make their appointments by single sing-on/without username and password) and Xporter on Demand (giving schools even more control over their datasharing, helping set up events even more quickly).

Next up: We’ll be visiting one of Scotland’s most prestigious secondary schools to film a new advert. We’ll also be talking to the head teacher about how we’re helping their school launch a new way of running parents’ evenings, that makes them more efficient, that can only be run using our software. It’s our sincere hope that this school’s new plans are a huge hit and that we can help roll the idea out to other schools in due course.

Behind the scenes we’ll continue working hard to bring schools new features (such as a booking wizard for the admin area, some improved changes to the event statistics we capture, and a completely new website design that will give us a new look for next academic year).

Wishing all of our customers lots of success as this academic year rumbles on.

Netmedia.

We’re happy to boast lots of RM Integris customers, and this an update is for them.

RM Education recently released their new ‘Datashare’ for Integris. We’re part of this Datashare.

What does this mean? It means that it’s easier than ever for customers to authorise us as a data sharing partner and, fundamentally, upload the pupil, parent and teacher data that we require to help schools run parents’ evening and event booking online.

We’ve moved all RM customers over from the older data upload mechanism, although this may not be obvious at first. Not much has changed in our software. Your data upload will now go through the new Integris Datashare, but will only work if you have authorised us as a trusted application.

If you’re an Integris user, and a customer of ours, all you need to do is authorise us in the ‘Datashare’ section of Integris. Instructions can be found here.

The new upload should run even faster, and is GDPR compliant, both of which we’re schools will be happy to hear.

We are excited to announce that schools may now add our Event Booking bolt-on to their account. Indeed, schools who would like to use us purely for event booking can sign up for just this tool. The most-requested new functionality from customers for the past year has been an Event Booking capability. Although not part of our core functionality, we’ve built this so that customers can be supported in more of their objectives.

Schools who want to run event booking online can now do this by having us turn on this bolt-on for them. Schools can take registration for events, sign-up for trips and sell tickets for shows/performances/concerns. Parents simple need to log in, just like they would for parents’ evening, and make their bookings. Parents can then print or e-mail their confirmation. As you would expect, the school can make bookings and see who has and has not booked.