March 25, 2024
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
Effective March 28, 2024, CARES-Live 2.8.29 Release is Scheduled to Move Into Production
The CARES-Live team has scheduled release activity that will interrupt connectivity to the CARES-Live application. The release activity will begin at 6:00 PM on Thursday, March 28, 2024, and conclude at 9:00 PM. During this release, the CARES-Live team will focus on application changes, and users will not be able to access the CARES-Live application during this scheduled outage.
CARES-Live 2.8.29:
- This release address security findings and other infrastructure updates and security patches not visible to CARES-Live users.
Action Required
If users experience any issues with CARES-Live, please follow your county process for reporting issues. CARES-Live County Administrators may contact the CARES Service Desk through the CWDS ServiceNow Customer Support Management (CSM) Portal. Alternate methods are phoning 1-855-292-3444 or via email at Servicedesk@cwds.ca.gov during normal business hours. You may also email after hours and a Service Desk representative will contact you the next business day.
March 20, 2024
Communications
All SPOCs, Technical Contacts, and CAD Contacts:
The California Department of Technology (CDT), working with the CWDS Team, have scheduled maintenance for the CAD/Business Objects (BO) server. The maintenance window is scheduled for Sunday, April 7, 2024, beginning at 8:00 AM and concluding at 1:00 PM. CAD Business Objects (BO) / Business Intelligence (BI) will not be accessible during the maintenance window.
Any BO reports scheduled to run during this timeframe will be affected.
Action Required
Review scheduled BO reports and rerun the report jobs, as necessary.
Contact the IBM Help Desk (800-428-8268) to report any issues with your Business Objects content.
March 14, 2024
Communications
All Pilot County RFA Implementation Coordinators and SPOCs:
The CWS-CARES team has scheduled maintenance activity for the CWS-CARES production environment for Monday, March 25, 2024, beginning at 5:30 PM and concluding at 7:30 PM. During the maintenance window, the CWS-CARES Resource Family Approval (RFA) Application Submission, Review, and Approval Process will be inaccessible for pilot counties Contra Costa, Fresno, Placer, and Santa Clara.
During the maintenance window, document related functionality in the CARES application will not be accessible.
Action Required
No action required for end-users is needed during this maintenance window.
If users experience any issues with the CWS-CARES, please follow your county process for reporting issues. CWS-CARES County Administrators may contact the CARES Service Desk through the CWDS ServiceNow Customer Support Management (CSM) Portal. Alternate methods are phoning 1-855-292-3444 or via email at Servicedesk@cwds.ca.gov during normal business hours. You may also email after hours, and a Service Desk representative will contact you the next business day.
March 13, 2024
Communications
All SPOCs, Technical Contacts, and SBC Administrators:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled maintenance on Saturday, March 30, 2024, beginning at 6:00 AM and concluding at 10:00 AM. During the maintenance window, CDT will apply Standard Monthly OS Security Patches to SBCS Infrastructure Servers. There is no anticipated outage for this maintenance; however, CDT is asking that everyone log off from the Citrix SBC system, if not actively using it during the maintenance window.
Action Required
If users experience any issues with CWS/CMS, please follow your county process for reporting issues or you may contact the IBM Boulder Help Desk at 1-800-428-8268.
March 13, 2024
Communications
ALL SPOCs, Technical Contacts and CAD Contacts:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled maintenance of the SAFE Cloud service. The maintenance begins on Saturday, March 30, 2024, at 8:00 PM and concludes on Sunday, March 31, 2024, at 2:00 AM. The activity will cause interruptions in the SAFE Cloud service. Some Business Objects (BO) reports will fail to send, or automated scripts may fail to retrieve from SAFE during this scheduled maintenance.
Action Required
All users should logoff of the SAFE Cloud service prior to the start of the stated maintenance timeframe. Please check on your scheduled BO SAFE reports and automated FTP scripts. If needed, re-run the reports and scripts.
Contact the IBM Help Desk (800-428-8268) to report any issues with your Business Objects content in SAFE.
March 05, 2024
Communications
All Pilot County RFA Implementation Coordinators and SPOCs:
The CWS-CARES team has scheduled maintenance activity for the CWS-CARES production environment for Monday, March 11, 2024, beginning at 5:00 PM and concluding at 10:00 PM. During the maintenance window, the CWS-CARES Resource Family Approval (RFA) Application Submission, Review, and Approval Process will be inaccessible for pilot counties Contra Costa, Fresno, Placer, and Santa Clara.
During the maintenance window, document related functionality in the CARES application will not be accessible.
Action Required
No action is required for end-users during this maintenance window.
If users experience any issues with the CWS-CARES, please follow your county process for reporting issues. CWS-CARES County Administrators may contact the CARES Service Desk through the CWDS ServiceNow Customer Support Management (CSM) Portal. Alternate methods are phoning 1-855-292-3444 or via email at Servicedesk@cwds.ca.gov during normal business hours. You may also email after hours, and a Service Desk representative will contact you the next business day.
March 05, 2024
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled a change window on Sunday, March 17, 2024, to upgrade switches at the Gold Camp Data Center. The change window will begin at 4:00 AM and conclude at 8:00 AM.
The CARES-Live application will experience up to a 40-minute interruption in service within the change window.
CWS/CMS connections through the Gold Camp facility will failover to either the Orange or Vacaville Data Center facilities while the change is in progress. CWS/CMS users may experience a slightly longer time than usual to connect to the CWS/CMS application while the network looks for connections to the other two Data Centers. No interruption in service is expected for the CWS/CMS application during this activity.
There is no impact to connectivity to CWS-CARES.
Action Required
CWS/CMS Users - If users experience any issues with CWS/CMS, please follow your county process for reporting issues, or you may contact the IBM Boulder Help Desk at 1-800-428-8268.
CARES-Live Users - Please follow your county process for reporting issues. CARES-Live County Administrators may contact the CARES Service Desk through the CWDS ServiceNow Customer Support Management (CSM) Portal. Alternate methods are phoning 1-855-292-3444 or via email at Servicedesk@cwds.ca.gov during normal business hours. You may also email after hours, and a Service Desk representative will contact you the next business day.
February 26, 2024
Communications
SPOCs and Technical Contacts for Kings, Lake, Napa, Orange, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Stanislaus Counties:
IBM ran a report on February 12, 2024, shortly after the CWS/CMS Release 9.3 implementation, to view when the Robocopy script was last ran. The Robocopy script is the formal process in which Counties receive the latest CWS/CMS MSI installation file. Eight (8) of the Counties had either not ran a new Robocopy script for quite some time or had never ran it. We assume these Counties must be manually copying the MSI files, instead of using the Robocopy script automatically replicate them, prior to the CWS/CMS release.
If a County needs assistance with updating the Robocopy script schedule to automatically replicate the CWS/CMS release MSI file to their County share folder, please submit an IBM Help Desk ticket (800-428-8268). The IBM team will work with your county to troubleshoot this issue.
Action Required
Contact the IBM Help Desk (800-428-8268) if a County wants assistance from IBM to automatically replicate the MSI files to the County’s shared folder using the Robocopy script.
February 23, 2024
Communications
All CAD Contacts and SPOCs:
February 23, 2024 UPDATE: The low disk space warning for the CAD BusinessObjects (BO) server has been mitigated. It was discovered that a very large extract report had inadvertently been set to run hourly and to send the results to the entire county group, rather than a single in-box. This resulted in over 600GB of data, replicated across several in-boxes. The report schedule was deleted and the in-boxes cleaned up, correcting the storage issues.
As a reminder, here are some space saving tips:
- Make sure the scheduled report recurrence is, at most frequent, daily. The data is only updated once a day, so hourly does not serve any purpose.
- Only address scheduled reports to an individual’s in-box for destination. Do not use the county group.
- Check your in-box regularly and keep it clean. If you need to store a report, move it to your personal folders.
- Limit the number of instances you retain. Remember that you can always re-run a report. Consider saving data to a secure county location if required for date-sensitive retention.
- Clean up old versions of reports that are no longer needed. This will save space, and time when we have to move to CARES Analytics.
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The CWS/CMS CAD BusinessObjects (BO) server has seen an increase in report storage, resulting in low disk space warnings and some intermittent report scheduling failures. While the free space on the server remains low, there is a chance of intermittent failure for scheduled reports. Please review your scheduled reports each morning and re-run if necessary.
Action Required
If you have recently added or modified scheduled BO reports, please review these schedules to make sure you are only running the report when needed. Report recurrence frequency should not be scheduled more frequently than daily, at most. Also, check that only the minimum number of instances are being retained by BusinessObjects.
All users, please review all of your reports and delete any old, unused, or duplicate reports. Please also review versioning and delete older versions if no longer needed. If it is not possible to delete reports, please purge obsolete data from reports to reduce disk usage.
Contact Chris Lovejoy (Chris.Lovejoy@osi.ca.gov) if you require more information regarding these requests.
February 20, 2024
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
The CARES-Live team has scheduled maintenance for the CARES-Live application. The maintenance is scheduled for Thursday, February 22, 2024, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. During this scheduled maintenance the CARES-Live team will focus on application maintenance changes that are not visible to CARES-Live users.
NOTE: Users will not be able to access the CARES-Live application during the scheduled outage.
Action Required
If users experience any issues with CARES-Live, please follow your county process for reporting issues. CARES-Live County Administrators may contact the CARES Service Desk through the CWDS ServiceNow Customer Support Management (CSM) Portal. Alternate methods are phoning 1-855-292-3444 or via email at Servicedesk@cwds.ca.gov during normal business hours. You may also email after hours and a Service Desk representative will contact you the next business day.
