Dear Product and Development Team at iSAMS,
First of all, I would like to say that the Cloud Parent Portal is a welcome improvement to the overall iSAMS experience. The modernisation effort is appreciated, and the direction is promising. However, from both an administrative and developer perspective, several key areas feel unnecessarily restricted and significantly limit the platform’s flexibility, usefulness and potential.
One of the biggest concerns is the implementation of “Custom Pages.”
At the moment, these are not truly custom pages, as the functionality only allows external links rather than actual page creation within the portal itself. This is a major limitation for schools like ours, where we have a large amount of information we would like to communicate directly to parents and students within the portal environment.
Examples include:
School policies
Digital handbooks
IT support resources
Curriculum information
Event documentation
Student guidance resources
Without the ability to create genuine internal pages, the portal feels more like a collection of redirects rather than a flexible communication platform.
In addition to the above, it is surprising that administrators cannot properly manage or extend the navigation menu. The ability to add internal or external URLs directly into the Parent Portal navigation should be a standard feature. This would greatly improve usability and allow schools to better tailor the portal experience to their own workflows and communication needs.
The current text editing experience is also extremely limited.
A modern WYSIWYG editor would significantly improve content management and presentation. Currently:
URLs appear only as plain text
Styling options are minimal
No CSS classes can be assigned
Layout flexibility is almost non-existent
For a cloud platform in 2026, the lack of a proper content editor feels outdated and restrictive.
The dashboard would benefit enormously from more flexible card management options.
Suggested improvements:
Adjustable card sizes
Stackable and column-based layouts
Drag-and-drop positioning
Responsive grid management
This would allow schools to prioritise important content and create a much more intuitive user experience for parents and students.
Another major limitation is the complete absence of custom CSS or styling overrides.
Even limited scoped CSS support would allow schools to:
Better align the portal with school branding
Improve accessibility
Optimise layouts
Enhance usability
At present, the platform feels extremely static, with very little room for customisation or adaptation.
As a developer, I find the current level of customisability disappointing. The platform has strong potential, but many of the limitations make it feel closed and rigid, especially compared to modern portal and CMS systems.
Schools often have unique workflows, branding requirements, and communication needs. Providing more flexibility would greatly increase the value of the Parent Portal and improve adoption across institutions.
I hope these points can be considered for future development and roadmap discussions.
Kind regards,
Dave Piersma
