To be fair, that town hall was the first and only time I’ve heard anyone talk about other CF adopting Bader rather than the other way around.
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My understanding isn’t the lack of email, because pretty sure you adopted the armymail system. That’s pretty old and undeveloped now.
Teams is where you’re right, because I’ve been led to believe you don’t have a 365 environment full stop?
When reviewing the current systems, Bader is seen to be more fleshed out, with greater functionality across the whole suite. MOD have looked at ACF plans to further develop Westminster and said “why bother when this already exists?”.
My take is: they should adopt BADER for email, Teams, etc. but keep Westminster for event and personnel management. Cost, though - rolling out 365 to a much larger number of personnel.
And it’s increasingly a problem that we don’t have MODNET accounts, TBH.
There is a virtual desktop solution for MODNET Official, currently used for contractors and reservists without laptops: although it wold be a retrograde from what we’re used to with Bader (e.g. no mobile apps, for example).
This!
Having access to MODNET, even a limited access would make working with units on stations and camps so much easier.
The amount of times when trying to book facilities we get referred to to a form or calendar we can’t access, or access to BAM’s
This would be fine, as we’d only need to use it for specific things anyway.
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Ignoring the WM question, then we could have MODNET only for email and sharepoint, perhaps?
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ArmyMail offers IMAP/SMTP, so development is irrelevant. Why would they work on an online email client when every operating system comes with a built in email client?
I don’t have access to Bader to compare, but I’m unaware of anything it has that Westminster doesn’t. I mean we have full event planning and authorisation processes, full reporting on personnel and qualifications, VA processing, stores management, county to detachment level calendars, course searching and booking, event payment recording (soon to include online payment processing), DLE integration, Resource Centre, Cadet Portal for cadets, MyCadet for parents (a bit basic at the moment but does electronic parental consent and personal details updates), application tracking for cadets and new staff, parade night attendance recording.
The only thing it is really missing that I consider important is 2 way messaging between staff and cadets (in a safeguarding compliant manner)/parents. We can do one way broadcast messages, but that’s it.
This is something we definitely could use on bader & don’t have - those cadet forces using Westminster all have access.
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I’ve not been a heavy WM user since 2020 when I stood down as Cont Cdr but I’d tend to agree, and it’s only improved since then. My only major gripes were it was terrible at recording syllabus progression because it wasn’t set up right - a problem which would go away if RAFAC were using it.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never noticed many issues with that. When there have been problems, they have been fixed pretty rapidly. I think a contributory factor is so many CFAVs are programmed to not raise problems that are outside of their remit, try to raise problems through the chain of command like it is some kind of disciplinary issue, or just accept that there is a problem and that they personally can’t fix it so do nothing. Me, I just email the Westminster team direct and problems get fixed in a day or so.
The linkage problem between Westminster and SMS is that information flow is only one way.
A cadet joins CCF on Westminster, details uploaded to SMS. But when a cadet leaves, they only leave on Westminster, SMS doesn’t automatically get updated of the departure.
Have you spoken to the Westminster and SMS teams about the issue? If a cadet being added on WM gets uploaded to SMS, a cadet getting SOS should be able to have the same done on SMS.