PowerSchool SIS 23.5.0.0

Enhanced User Interface

Administrators now have the Enhanced User Interface feature set that will greatly simplify everyday use and navigation within the PowerSchool SIS administrator portal. The PowerSchool Enhanced User Interface includes:

• Redesign of Navigation Styling provides a more modern design and simplifies use.

• Reorganization of the Navigation Information Architecture creates a more intuitive task-based menu structure for seamless navigation and reduced onboarding time.

• People Selection Prompts allow users to make student, staff, and contact selections as part of navigating rather than needing to return to the start page.

• Enhanced People Selection Workflows allow users to quickly switch students or staff within a selection, update the selection, or switch between students and staff all within the student or staff menu.

• Quick Search for Pages and People provides direct navigation to pages or people without affecting the current selection and reduces navigation time and disruptions.

• Favorites provides a space for organizing personalized categories and frequently used pages to create workflows and mini dashboards.

• Enhanced Page Permissions provides efficient screens for managing permissions and tailoring navigations per user group.

• Enhanced Custom Link Management provides simplified processes for adding custom pages into the navigation.

• Database Driven Navigation provides a customizable foundation for the navigation system and allows for page searching and favoriting.

Not ready for the Enhanced User Interface? The Enhanced User Interface can be enabled through the use of security groups or User Access Roles, so they can be activated at your own pace.

Please be mindful, any customizations might be affected by the Enhanced User Interface and may need to be adjusted. Custom links specifically will need to be re-inserted into the navigation to be visible.

Enhanced User Interface support for other PowerSchool products that add links to PowerSchool SIS will be released in May. These products include Ecollect Forms, Enrollment Express, PowerPack (including Document Cloud), and Special Programs. Please be on the lookout for their specific release notes for further details.

Enhanced UI

Insider Episode 131

Page Names and Locations Crosswalk

How to Customize the Enhanced Navigation Menu

Naviance Staff Integration

SIS now offers a staff integration for districts with both SIS and Naviance and has installed and updated their Naviance Plug-in. Districts can set up their staff in SIS and the staff users will sync to Naviance. Naviance will also check to see if the staff members coming from SIS have a user access role with the Naviance counselor property checked.

https://ps.powerschool-docs.com/naviance/latest/prepare-for-the-staff-data-integration

User Access Roles

Naviance Integration

Security

• The Mass Assign ID/Password function will no longer set the Students.Student_Web_Password field. The Mass Assign ID/Password function can still be used to assign the Access ID and Access Password used to link Students when creating a Parent account.

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

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

• The Students.Student_Web_Password field is no longer exportable or available on reports. This does not apply to the the Access ID and Access Password fields used to link Students when creating a Parent account.

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

  • Student and Teacher Import (Quick Import/AutoComm)

  • Student Access Accounts

  • Teachers and Affiliations

  • Admin Access and Roles

  • Contacts Edit Web Account Access

• When PowerSchool is the Identity Provider (IdP)

  • Students at or above grade 9 are required to change their passwords if their password was set by an Administrator or imported. Districts can change this setting to be a lower grade level if desired.

  • Students at or above grade 9, or lower grade as configured by the district, can recover their username and password using the Forgot Username or Password? function.

IDs and Passwords

Password Rules Management Setup

Help

The Help and Data Dictionary links in PowerSchool SIS have been updated to point directly to the new Help site.

Plugins

Plugins utilizing OIDC or SAML SSO links can now get locale information so they can properly implement multiple languages.

PowerScheduler Server-Side Build Engine

• In an effort to encourage more usage and feedback for the new Build server engine during our production beta, everyone will now have access to the Engine Builder - Enable Server-Side Engine (Beta) option on the Scheduling Preferences page.

• The server-side engine can now process lunch courses for teachers. 

Public Portal

The Relationship field has been removed when a parent creates an account or adds additional students. This field was not used or visible on the Contacts screen in the Administrator portal. This is not the same as the Relationship field seen when working with a Contact in the Administrator portal.

Add Students to Your Account

Security Group

A new Security Group setting called Student Email has been added under Accessible Student Screens. This will be enabled for all groups by default. The Student Email screen was previously controlled by the Parents option under Accessible Student Screens.

Stability

The threshold for the existing TLIST_SQL and PowerQueries timeouts has been lowered to help ensure system stability:

• TLIST_SQL - 5 minutes, previously 10 minutes

• PowerQueries - Cookie Based Authentication - 5 minutes, previously 1 hour.

Substitute Teacher

Substitute teacher sign-in can now be managed using the Enable Substitute Teacher Sign-In option in the System Security Settings page. When upgrading PowerSchool, if no Substitute logins exist in the LOGINS table the option will be disabled.

Substitute Sign In Permissions

System

• The Apache Tomcat and Amazon Corretto Java versions have been updated. See the PowerSchool Components section of the Release Notes for detailed version information.

• The following settings have been removed from the System Security page:

  • Maximum number of concurrent user sessions

  • Maximum number of concurrent student sessions

  • Maximum number of concurrent parent sessions settings

System Security

Unified User

• All students in grades 9 and above will be required to reset any previous temporary admin-set or teacher-set passwords.

• The Password Rules Management page is no longer accessible when Unified User is enabled.

Unified User

The OIDC authentication setup page has been hidden for districts with Unified User.

Universal Rostering

• The homeSchoolNumber and homeSchoolSourceId properties have been added to the student endpoint metadata.

• Universal Rostering now supports filtering on metadata properties on all the endpoints.

Attendance

Students' grade level and school show correctly in the detail header when modifying Meeting Attendance for schools where the default attendance mode is not Meeting.

PSF-81569

Attendance Tracking & Notification

ATN functionality will now calculate truancies correctly if no bridge period is defined in the bell schedule.

PSSR-315514

Course

Inactive courses will no longer appear when filtering for active courses at the district level.

PSF-75492

District Calendars

Running the Automated Calendar Setup will no longer cause errors when using the Clean Up Not In-Session Days option.

PSF-79845

Fees

The Balance value will now update properly when deleting a student fee.

PSF-78995

Graduation Plan

The Graduation Plan Setup will no longer produce an error when many students are assigned to a single graduation plan.

PSF-80910

Graduation Plan

Earned credits will now display when adding a Test Requirement to a Course Requirement.

PSF-79259

Health Management

An error no longer occurs when setting Current Selection with Screening Outcome showing.

PSF-77242

Performance

The performance has been improved when accessing PowerScheduler with a large active Course Catalog.

PSF-81384

Performance

The performance of the Mobile App Sync and PowerTeacher Pro have been improved when accessing Student Scores data.

PSF-80088

Plugins

The Ecollect plugin will now properly update the client secret details in the PluginConfOAuthConsumer table.

PSF-77153

PowerScheduler Server-Side Build Engine

Should a build fail due to a Fatal Error Runtime Exception, the PSJ-Runtime Log will provide more details.

PSF-81671

Remote Enrollment

When creating a remote enrollment for a Student, their Stored Grades are no longer updated with a STUMOriginatingDistricts custom field.

PSF-79973

ReportWorks Developer

Students with Office Visit Outcomes will now display the valid outcome values in the ReportWorks Developer report preview.

PSF-77784

Student Transfer

Student transfer records will no longer fail when a foster parent is not found.

This issue applies to NC and AL customers.

PSF-78732

Unified User

The OIDC Service Plug-In will remain turned on in your SIS instance and you will not be able to disable it after taking the authentication system upgrade.

PSF-80337

Years and Terms

The Years/Terms/Semesters/Trimesters will now display correctly.

PSF-50922

23.3.0.1

23.5.0.0

PowerSchool SIS Server

23.3.0.1

23.5.0.0

ReportWorks

1.5.1.47

1.5.1.48

PowerScheduler

3.1.0

3.1.0

Oracle

19c

19c

State Reporting

23.3.2.0

23.4.3.0

Report SDK

1.36.0.0

1.37.0.0

Amazon Corretto Java

1.8u322

1.8u362

Apache Tomcat

8.5.78

8.5.87