PowerSchool SIS 23.2.0.0

PowerScheduler Build Server Engine (Beta)

PowerSchool is pleased to announce that a production beta of our PowerScheduler Build server engine is now available. This engine will run on the PowerSchool SIS instance, allowing Schedulers to build their schedule from anywhere.

A production beta is an opportunity to use a new feature in a production environment to help uncover potential issues, prior to general availability. Since there are so many ways to build a schedule, we are offering a beta version of the build server engine to our community during the current scheduling season to increase the testing field.

Districts interested in building their schedule using this production beta are invited to complete this application form, which will only take 5 minutes.

The new desktop (64-bit) Build engine is still available for use and can be downloaded from the Tools section on the PowerScheduler page or from PowerSource.

Security

As part of PowerSchool's ongoing commitment to the security of the PowerSchool products, the following improvements have been made as part of this release. These changes and future changes announced below apply to users authenticating to PowerSchool SIS as an Identity Provider (IdP) and do not apply to users authenticating to LDAP, SAML, OIDC, or Unified User.

• Users will be prompted to change their password if the password does not meet the complexity requirements defined in Password Rules Management.

• Users will be prompted to change their password if the password is a well-known password.

• The Account Lockout Rule defined in Password Rules Management can no longer be disabled. If this was previously disabled, a value of 0, the value will be updated to 20.

• Password Rules Management and Student Password Management will only show settings for the user types where PowerSchool is the IdP.

• Administrator-defined passwords in the PCAS table will be converted to a hash as part of the upgrade. User-entered passwords were always stored in the PCAS tables as a hashed value.

  Depending on the number of PCAS_Account records this process will increase the upgrade time of PowerSchool SIS. The process takes approximately 16 minutes per 4k accounts that have an Admin set password.

  Large districts with 100k or more Students that uses an external IdP for Admin, Teachers, and/or Parents may see an upgrade time of 12+ hours while the encrypted values are changed to a hashed value.

Upcoming PowerSchool SIS Changes:

The following functions will be changed or removed in the PowerSchool SIS 23.5.0.0 (Back to School) release. The changes below do not impact Quick Import or AutoComm.

• The Mass Assign ID/Password function will no longer set the Students.Student_Web_Password field.

• The Students.Student_Web_Password field will be removed from available fields from the Student Field Value and DDA Mass Modify functions.

• The Teachers.Password and Teachers.TeacherLoginPW will be removed from available fields from the Teacher Field Value and DDA Mass Modify functions.

• The Students.Student_Web_Password field will no longer be exportable or available on reports.

• Temporary Passwords, those that are Administrator set or imported, will be validated that they meet the Password Complexity rules and are not a well-known passwords.

• When PowerSchool is the Identity Provider (IdP), Students at or above grade 9 will be required to change their passwords if their password was set by an Administrator or imported. Districts will be able to change this setting to be a lower grade level if desired.

To help facilitate these changes, PowerSchool will also be making Student password workflow improvements, such as the ability for Teachers to reset Student passwords when PowerSchool SIS is the Identity Provider (IdP).

Password Rules Management

Password Rules Management Setup

Universal Rostering

The getResultsForLineItemForClass endpoint is now available in Universal Rostering.

Universal Rostering

The getResultsForClass endpoint is now available in Universal Rostering.

Attendance

When manually typing an attendance code for a period attendance, the suggestion menu box will no longer appear detached high above the dialogue box.

PSF-72227

Attendance

The nightly Attendance Day Part process has been improved to process schools in parallel. This functionality applies to Ontario and Oklahoma customers.

PSF-76483

Auditing

The ExecutionID value is now populated in tables where light auditing is enabled. The ExecutionID value will continue to be populated in the full audit tables. The ps-log-audit log has been updated to capture the ExecutionID value. This allows for better tracking of the page interaction that resulted in the data change when an end user does it.

PSF-77044

Contacts

Resolved several issues with inactive contacts.

PSF-76494

Courses

Users can now enable the Make Available and Active flag for unavailable courses and submit the change.

PSF-77008

Data Import Manager

The Field Delimiter and Character Set dropdown fields will now be available when using the Data Import Manager on a macOS.

PSF-75432

Data Import Manager

The Health: Immunizations import will no longer produce errors when updating dosage dates to empty or when changing dose order.

PSF-73608

General

The following quality-of-life fixes have been made:

• When at District Office the Grade Levels shown on the start page will only include the distinct Grade Levels that the schools support. This resolves an issue where, if the Low/High-Grade Level at Graduated Students was set to 99, the start page would list all Grade Levels up to 99.

• The Plugin Management Dashboard now also includes the Installed/Updated On date. This information was previously only available after selecting a plugin.

• The ~(decode DAT works as expected in Teacher AutoSends.

PSF-75571

Graduation Plan Progress

The Graduation Plan Progress page will no longer cause an error for students with historical grades having a null Earned Credit value.

PSF-74925

Graduation Plan Progress

The Graduation Plan Progress page will now display correctly for students that have completed one of two optional requirements.

PSF-74862

Health Concern Report

The Health Concern Report will no longer fail if the Health Concern code contains an apostrophe or other special characters.

PSF-73741

Seating Chart

The following message will appear when selecting a blank seating chart for a class with multiple seating charts: No students are associated with the seating chart.

PSF-67621

Sections

When editing State Reporting values for Lead or Co-Teacher from the Sections page, the values save as expected if the input type is a checkbox.

PSF-77302

Single Sign-on

Newly created administrator or teacher accounts will no longer receive an HTTP 401 error when logging in with Single Sign-on.

PSF-76069

Student

Certain Student pages will now maintain the proper behavior for users with read-only access.

PSF-15506

23.1.0.0

23.2.0.0

PowerSchool SIS Server

23.1.0.0

23.2.0.0

ReportWorks

1.5.1.47

1.5.1.48

PowerScheduler

3.1.0

3.1.0

Oracle

19c

19c

State Reporting

23.1.2.0

23.2.2.0

Report SDK

1.34.0.0

1.35.0.0

Amazon Corretto Java

1.8u322

1.8u322