PowerSchool 8.x End-of-Life

PaulNews, Power School

I just got this email. We’re still on 8.3 and we plan on upgrading to 9.x for the next school year. What about you?

Dear Valued PowerSchool Customer,

This letter serves as a formal notice of the end of product life cycle for all versions of PowerSchool 8.x. We are providing this notice to give you sufficient time for appropriate planning.

Software products are updated over time by newer versions with richer functionality, improved stability and performance, enhanced security, and required state/provincial reporting updates. Newer versions of PowerSchool have many more features and improved functionality that better support school and classroom management. Many critical security fixes have also been implemented in PowerSchool 9.x and Oracle 12c. PowerSchool 8.x is unable to offer these important updates and security enhancements, including database updates.

We recommend that customers upgrade to PowerSchool 9.0 or greater before July 1, 2016. After this date, software updates for PowerSchool 8.x, including state/provincial reporting, will no longer be available. Our technology and support teams will be focused solely on supporting PowerSchool 9.0 or greater. PowerSchool 9.x, which has been available since June 2015, resolves many of the known issues in PowerSchool 8.x.

Customers with active support contracts through July 1st will continue to receive support for PowerSchool 8.x until this date. We are committed to providing the highest level of support during this time. Districts can choose to upgrade to

PowerSchool 9.x at any time before then, and we encourage districts to do so.

What are some of the benefits to upgrading to PowerSchool 9.x or higher?

  • 298 Reported Issues Resolved
  • State Compliance Improvements and Updates
  • Data Visualizations and Grid Features
  • Data Export Manager Improvements
  • Standards Hierarchy and Course Associations By Year
  • Standards Grades by Section with New Data Access Abilities
  • Scheduling Enhancements
  • PowerSchool API and Single Sign-On Enhancements
  • Improved API and Plugin Documentation
  • Usability Enhancements
  • Graduation Planner Enhancements
  • Enterprise Reporting
  • PowerTeacher Pro

We provide and manage the infrastructure in a SAS 70 certified data center, ensuring that your PowerSchool instance is always running in an optimal environment consisting of leading-edge hardware, business practices, and disaster recovery technologies and strategies. Hosted clients are able to post their own customizations in PowerSchool and restart the application themselves. Customers can also choose to have their PowerSchool instance automatically updated when new releases become available. For more information about PowerSchool Hosting Services, please contact your account representative.

Alternately, we provide PowerSchool customers with the option to retain ownership and control of their hardware at their site while still benefitting from PowerSchool’s stewardship of the PowerSchool environment. Our popular Enterprise Management Service (EMS) provides 24/7/365 monitoring, 16/7/354 staffing, 365 days of backups stored offsite, monthly reports, quarterly security audits, daily data refreshes of test instances, and unlimited PowerSchool, Oracle, state/provincial reporting, SIF, and operating system upgrades and updates. For more information regarding EMS, please send an email to TSG at tsghelpdesk@powerschool.com.

PowerSchool customers may choose to purchase only the PowerSchool 9 Upgrade from TSG. To better serve our customers with the upgrade without incurring any downtime during the school week, TSG will waive the fee normally required for the completion of the migration during a weekend. For more information concerning the price, scope, and availability of this service, or to receive a quote for the purchase of discounted hardware, please send an email to TSG at tsghelpdesk@powerschool.com.

Please make plans to upgrade to the latest PowerSchool release as soon as possible to keep up with features, enhancements and to ensure the easiest process for your state compliance submissions.

To help help you stay current with PowerSchool new and updated features, PowerSchool offers Keys to Ownership (KTOs) remote consulting to assist with planning and deployment.

For more information about the minimum requirements for upgrading to PowerSchool 9.0 or greater, please visit PowerSource at https://support.powerschool.com. If you have questions about the end of life cycle for PowerSchool 8.x, please contact the PowerSchool support team at 1-866-434-6276 or support@powerschool.com.

Sincerely,
The PowerSchool Team

Announcements from the Services Departments

From the Product Tailoring team:

Are you afraid to upgrade PowerSchool? Don’t be! With the ‘Protecting Your Assets’ program, if you upgrade PowerSchool to a newer version, and a customization becomes inoperable because of the upgrade, we will diagnose and repair it at no charge. Please contact Jennifer.DeGrie@powerschool.com to find out more about getting your existing customizations covered.

From the Keys to Ownership team:

To help help you stay current with PowerSchool new and updated features, PowerSchool offers Keys to Ownership (KTOs) remote consulting to assist with planning and deployment.

From the Training team:

In PowerSource on the Training tab, find these new resources: Distance Learning course on Enterprise Reporting and the collection of Mastery in Minutes tutorials on PowerTeacher Pro; use them to help get your staff up to speed with these new product enhancements.