Hero Linc-Ed

[Simon Phelon]

Hi, 

does anyone here have Hero as their school's SMS?  There is a new incoming Principal who is very keen on them but there is no real technical details that I can find about them anywhere.

I've contacted them a couple of times, getting some interesting responces - they didn't seem to know anything about Microsoft School Data Sync and were quite puzzled by my questions about Google Cloud Directory Sync.

At one point they said that no-one had ever asked about these features before, which either means everyone manages their Google Workspace manually or I'm not very good at getting my point across (or a bit of both).

Anyway, does anyone have experience of Hero?  Is there a manual export users function that people use to keep Google Workspace up to date or am I really the only person who trys to automate this sort of thing? 

[Jeffrey B]

Hi, I have had the misfortune of dealing with this system, from an integration standpoint, RUN away.  I have never dealt with a system/company that does more to get in your way and be unhelpful.

They do offer IDE Export but this is all manual and they refuse automation.  You can do a custom list but stuff like exporting a list of teachers including the class they teach is impossible directly.

If you add a student email address it tries to give them a logon to hero.  We got around this by adding a username field for syncing to 365.  There used to be a nice feature where you could do bulk alterations by uploading a csv but that has been disabled.

As to technical support, don't get your hopes up.  Only three user accounts in the whole school can be allocated rights to even talk to them and their resolution times are measured in quarters rather than days.  It took six months of hassling them to be able to get the student smsid in a custom list.

It does integrate with Viztab which proves they can do integration if they deam it nessisary.  I got as far as requesting an API to program something myself, which was also refused.

The product as seen by parents is very nice as is the UI for teachers, great for live feedback to parents and uses nice modern tech behind the scenes.  You will spend a fair chunk of time clearing browser cache keeping it all behaving though.

If you are doing anything non basic it gets in the way and irritates office staff.

As to any form of contact from them or sense of their direction you would think they were run by an 80s Era tv version of the CIA. They will tell you nothing and get angry if you ask anything outside their website bullet points.

You are not the first to ask about inegration with cloud stuff like M365 or GAFE or even AD. I have been bashing me head against that rock for two years now. I have a partial solution but it is a chore every step of the way.

If you are stuck with it I hope you have better luck with them than we have and hope to share notes. 

Jeffrey.

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From: techies-f...@googlegroups.com <techies-f...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Simon Phelon <si...@queenstownit.com>
Sent: Monday, 17 January 2022, 11:40
To: Techies for schools
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Hero Linc-Ed

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[Raewyn Nicholson]

Hi Simon

We changed to Hero mid 2019 - best decision.  We had Musac for a number of years, then eTap now Hero - best professional SMS programme I have used to date & is NZ based.  Lots of functionality you can tailor to meet your office & assessment/curriculum needs and great support.  Always looking at improving their system and open to any possibilities.

I am a past life techy person, more an Office Admin now that plays with & can see the techy side of our system with the help of TTS, always love to streamline.

Hero synchs with our Library system AccessIt and sign in Vistab.

We are a Google school, and the Office also uses Microsoft.  We have an onsite Domain Controller that synchs with Azure and Google that I create the data in Hero, export it and then use to update the DC that synchs with Google.  

To date there is no functionality within Hero to synch with these systems, you can export .csv or excel spreadsheets of the data.  

May have a chat with my tech & explore the possibilities to present to Hero.  Life is forever moving forwards.

Hope this helps.

Raewyn Nicholson

Administrator

09 627 9940

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[Simon Phelon]

Hey thanks for the responces.

The school doesn't have an on prem server anymore but I'm beginning to see value in resurecting it solely for AD and account syncing if the Princical goes ahead with Hero.

Thanks again.

[Adam Alexander]

Hey Simon,

We have had Linc-Ed, now Hero for a few years. Jeffrey's summary was pretty good. There is no ability yet to automate any users and I have to do all of ours manually through exporting .csvs. 

Almost on a daily basis, our teachers have issues submitting their morning/afternoon rolls and it seems to stem from a cache issue like Jeffrey said. It also has some very strange behaviour around people and solely bases ID on an email address. For example, if a parent gives their personal email address for their child and uses a work address as an emergency contact for another child, Hero will create two IDs for that one person. You cannot link people nor can you remove duplicate IDs. I also had the issue last year where a returning student re-enrolled and because Hero doesn't check corresponding NSNs, it created her a new ID. When I asked them to merge her (which I think they just deleleted one of her IDs), all her previous assessment data and pastoral notes were deleted with her - it certainly wasn't "merged".

If you're using it for a primary school, I wouldn't waste your time with the student side of it over a product like Seesaw. It was sold to us as a replacement to Seesaw and it doesn't even come close.

Our old office administrator used to curse Hero's name on a daily basis over the limitations and ...let's call them oversights in the office admin area. I must admit, it is pretty good for teachers and we have done a lot of work around the goals area to get it to meet our purpose.

Happy to talk further or show you ours if you want some more info. 

Adam.

[David Ogborne]

Hi Simon, 

I would be keen to see how you go with this. It would be great to see the SMS providers integrate with Microsoft user provisioning so that your users could be created automatically in Azure AD and then the account creation can flow on from there to other apps. I personally think that schools should have a strategy over the next year or two to remove AD to reduce the on-prem server footprint. This will reduce a schools risk from Cyber attacks and having to manage, update and upgrade the servers over time. Servers can be joined to Azure AD DS via a VPN or the server moved directly to Azure. This results in no Active Directory servers to look after anymore. 

Here is some more information: What is automated app user provisioning in Azure Active Directory | Microsoft Docs

I will be reaching out to some of the SMS providers to talk to them about their plans to support user provisioning and identity integration in the future.  

Feel free to contact me for more information: v-dog...@microsoft.com. 

Regards,

David. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/techies-for-schools/9f9e8fda-4a77-4aa4-aedb-2981991e1367n%40googlegroups.com.

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Regards,
David Ogborne

+64 21 463 574

[Sam McNeill]

Hi All,

I've talked with the vast majority of NZ SMS providers around automated deployment/management of users within the AzureAD world - this is achieved via the free tool School Data Sync

https://sds.microsoft.com/

You can see the list of supported SMS on the website above, many support CSV export functionality but only Edge (Musac) has completed the API integration for fully automated user provisioning.

Cheers

Sam

[Simon Phelon]

Thanks to everyone.

I have just been messaged by a friend of mine who used to work for the Ministry and has had quite a bit of contact with Linc-Ed over the years so I have a couple of phone numbers to pester people on.

The school uses Edge at the moment and I have to say that the setup of Microsoft School Data Sync was so easy, I was quite suspicious that I had missed out some steps.

They don't use much Office365 functionality but having an Azure AD self populating and self managing could be quite handy.

 

I haven’t pursued using Azure AD as a source for Google Cloud Directory Sync as I got the news that we may be shifting to Hero.  I have previously used an on prem AD server with GADS and then GCDS and that worked fine so I imagine that it would be do-able.

I'll definitely keep adding to this topic as I go. 

 

[Sam McNeill]

Hi Simon,

you can do SSO from AAD to Google natively:

Configure Single Sign On (SSO) From Azure Activity Directory Into Google Suite In Only 2 Minutes – SamuelMcNeill.com

Cheers,

Sam

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+64 21 438 726

www.samuelmcneill.com 

[Simon Phelon]

I've just had an email back from Hero:

"We are currently in talks with the team at Wonde.  They are finalising their integration with Hero.  Once the integration is live, schools will be able to sign up for a free wonde account to manage integration with many third parties, including Google and Microsoft.  Unfortunately, I need to meet with another member of our team to get a timeline on this.  I cant get that answer until later today or tomorrow."

There is a Wonde Google Sync app http://help.wonde.com/en/articles/3957980-initial-setup-of-wonde-google-sync so that looks good.

I'm guessing that the Wonde account is free but there will be a cost to use the sync function.