Set at the stunning venue of Eton’s Dorney Lake in Windsor, we were delighted to be invited to participate in a one day seminar hosted by Eton College last month. Over 60 delegates from UK and European schools attended the event where iSAMS, Firefly and a selection of independent schools provided some insightful presentations.
John Sainthouse, Head of Information Technology at Eton College welcomed the delegates and kindly hosted the successful event which received tremendously positive feedback from all that attended.
Following the morning welcome and introduction (complete with beautiful views, refreshments and lots of sunshine), delegates were offered a selection of presentations, organised across three main streams running simultaneously throughout the day. Guest schools including Wycombe Abbey School, Harrow School, Eton College, The Leys School and King Edward VI Southampton offered presentations in the ‘Schools’ stream. Firefly and our iSAMS Managing Director, Alastair Price, led presentations in the other two streams.
The event provided a great opportunity for iSAMS users to network with fellow peers, learn more about our system – including future plans for development, and find out more about how the MIS can be integrated with other 3rd Party integrators. It also allowed schools to see how others are integrating iSAMS and Firefly platforms, opening new and interesting conversations about data management.
Below is a short overview of the three iSAMS presentations provided by Alastair on the day.
“Integration: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”. This presentation focused on how schools and 3rd party integration processes have evolved – from crude data exports to synced data processes. Alastair shared a host of useful tips on best practice 3rd party integrations including adding a development and/or sandbox system. He also discussed some examples of 3rd party solutions that integrate with iSAMS.
“Batch and REST API”. In this seminar Alastair showed delegates how to use our API Services Manager applet to control API keys, security, methods and throttling. Complete with demo keys he showed delegates some real world examples of data sync tools using the Batch API as well as the customised workflow processes deployed using the real-time REST API.
“New Framework, Data Warehouse, BI Dashboards and New Portal Engine”. The final seminar looked at our new framework with a detailed insight into the architecture behind it and future roadmap. Details were also shared about existing custom module migrations and developing new modules to embed within it. The presentation concluded with information about new aspects to iSAMS: data warehousing, BI dashboards (the new desktop) and future portal developments.
A huge thank you goes to John Sainthouse and his colleagues at Eton College for organising the event, it was a thoroughly enjoyable day at a great venue. We hope that this will be the start of many more!