July 11th, 2024
Changes are being made to Edsby’s synchronization with PowerSchool
Background
Edsby has been staging improvements to its synchronization with PowerSchool SIS. Now that the school year has largely concluded for most Northern Hemisphere customers, Edsby is introducing these changes to minimize their potential impact on users running PowerSchool.
For customers using PowerSchool and running summer school in Edsby, note some changes may be necessary on your side immediately. Details below.
StudentContactRecord sync update
Edsby will now be filtering contact records based on fields that were previously inconsequential. Failure to account for these fields will cause contact records to be dropped, and any associated parent accounts with them. These two fields are the IsPreferred field for Contact Record phone numbers, and the AddressPriorityOrder field for Contact Record addresses. For each field, the following explains how we are now handling them in Edsby, and how they need to be set in PowerSchool.
IsPreferred is now required to be set for at least one phone number, per contact record, if you want it to appear in Edsby. If the IsPreferred field is enabled for a phone number, a checkmark will appear beside it in the “Preferred” column, as shown below.
If this field is not enabled for at least one phone number, then Edsby will not bring in a contact record for that parent. It is a field required by PowerSchool, so as long as there is a phone number, at least one should have it checked. You can have more than one preferred phone number per contact record, but they need to be differentiated by type. An example is shown below:
For each discrete type of phone number, the preferred checkmark can be set, and this will allow both types to be imported. In other words, if the parent has a Home phone number and a Mobile phone number, both can be preferred, and in this case, both will be brought into Edsby.
However, if a parent has two phone numbers with type “Mobile”, only one should be set to “Preferred”, otherwise two contact records will be created for that parent record as Edsby is not expecting two phone numbers of the same type to be preferred.
To summarize, at least one phone number per contact record needs to have the “Preferred” field set. Multiple phone number types can be brought in, such as Home, Mobile, or Business, and they will each need their own “Preferred” flag to be set respectively. If a contact record has not provided a phone number, a placeholder will need to be created, and it set to “Preferred”, otherwise the contact record will be ignored by our queries.
AddressPriorityOrder sync update
AddressPriorityOrder is also a field required by PowerSchool (and in fact automatically assigned by PowerSchool). So as long as the parent has at least one address registered, they will have this field set. It isn’t a field that is set directly like “Preferred” is for phone numbers. Instead it is manifest in the actual order in which the addresses appear for the contact record itself.
The address that appears at the top of the list in PowerSchool is the address that will be brought into Edsby. In this case, it would be the Mailing address. This can be controlled in PowerSchool, and reordered by using the up/down arrows, seen in the above example.
In the above example, for the “Home” address to be brought in for the contact record, instead of the “Mailing” address, it would need to be ordered at the top of the list. As many addresses with any type can be recorded in PowerSchool as desired. However, only the first would be brought into Edsby for that contact record.
This means that all contact records need at least one address on record in order to be brought into Edsby. Contact records without an address on record will not be brought into Edsby. So, if a contact record has not provided an address, a placeholder address will need to be created if you still want them to be brought into Edsby.
In internal testing, Edsby has seen up to 25% of contact records disappear from their respective StudentContactPersonal file on sandbox sites. Many of these were duplicates, but not necessarily all, so an audit of parent accounts before that time is recommended, especially for parents who have children enrolled in summer school. Otherwise, it is recommended that an audit be done before the start of school and before parent logins are re-enabled.
Changes to the synchronization of these two fields are especially relevant to PowerSchool customers running summer school with parents that are actively using Edsby at this time. But they will become relevant to all customers using PowerSchool when the new school year starts and parents are given access to Edsby again. To take advantage of these new changes and not receive any disruptions to existing parent accounts or contact records, data housekeeping in PowerSchool may be needed between now and the start of the school year.
Role mapping changes
A third change is to the way PowerSchool roles will be mapped to Edsby roles to allow them to be changed on a more ad hoc basis. Previously, the role mapping was hard coded and required developer time to change. With this new update, PowerSchool sites’ role mapping is now set via a CSV file and can be changed by simply uploading a new CSV with desired mapping.
Nothing will need to be done here unless you’d like to change your Role mapping as it currently stands. If that’s the case, please open a ticket with Edsby Support and we can perform the necessary changes for you, or if you would prefer, we can show you how to do it yourself.
Timing
Updates to PowerSchool synchronization logic have already been pushed live to most customers. Large school boards in Ontario running PowerSchool are targeted to receive these changes in production on July 26th, 2024. Currently, these changes are live on Ontario customers’ sandbox sites, where they can be tested to see how their environments will be affected.