Sims.Net is a very common and, in my opinion, a very badly written Management Information System used in the UK’s lower education sector – primary and secondary schools. It’s commonly used not because it’s good, but because it was one of the few options many years ago and a huge number of schools just haven’t bothered to move to something else. And I don’t blame them, it’s got a lot of history and data going back decades in that database. It’s not an easy thing to migrate off of.
ESS, the (current) caretakers of Sims.Net, have recently changed their licensing model to seemingly prevent third parties from hosting Sims.Net data on behalf of a school. I admit, I don’t know the details, but that’s the message as I understand it.
It looks like due to this, and the EOL of Server 2012R2, many school techs and sysadmins across the UK will be scrambling to get Sims.Net installed on an on-prem server.
Unfortunately, documentation is sparse. It’s a shame, but it costs a whole lot of cash to pay for third parties to do this for you. Right?
In the spirit of publishing guides for stuff organisations seemingly don’t want guides published for I’ve written up a guide on installing or migrating Sims.Net (and the horrible, horrible SOLUS3) server/database, because I struggled to find any well written and up to date guides and had to figure it out myself recently.
So if you’re looking to install or migrate Sims.Net, hop in and come for a ride. It’s easier than you think! Until you get to SOLUS3. We won’t be migrating that. But I’ll go through how to install it fresh!
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