CWDS Bulletins

All Dedicated County SPOCs and Technical Contacts:

December 12, 2025 UPDATE: The CWDS Infrastructure team successfully deployed the second of two network changes last night. Validation testing confirmed that the degraded initial login to the CWS/CMS application has been resolved. Users should not experience longer than usual connection time when connecting to the CWS/CMS application.

Please contact the IBM Help Desk (800-428-8268) to report any issues with CWS/CMS.

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The CWDS Infrastructure team deployed the first of two network changes last night. This change is causing a delay for users in some Dedicated Counties when they initially login to the CWS/CMS application. The extended login process takes impacted users an average of three to 25 seconds longer than a standard initial connection to CWS/CMS. The delayed connection occurs only during the initial connection; there is no observed delay with CWS/CMS following the login.

The CWDS Infrastructure is deploying the second part of the network change tonight. The initial login delay is expected to be removed following this second change.

Action Required

No action is needed for this activity.

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.

All Dedicated County SPOCs and Technical Contacts:

The CWDS Infrastructure team deployed the first of two network changes last night. This change is causing a delay for users in some Dedicated Counties when they initially login to the CWS/CMS application. The extended login process takes impacted users an average of three to 25 seconds longer than a standard initial connection to CWS/CMS. The delayed connection occurs only during the initial connection; there is no observed delay with CWS/CMS following the login.

The CWDS Infrastructure is deploying the second part of the network change tonight. The initial login delay is expected to be removed following this second change.

Action Required

No action is needed for this activity.

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.

All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:

EFFECTIVE December 15, 2025, CWS-CARES Interim RELEASE 0.17.1 PRODUCTION RELEASE IS PLANNED TO MOVE INTO PRODUCTION

The CWS-CARES team has scheduled release activity that will interrupt connectivity to the CWS-CARES Resource Family Approval (RFA) Application Submission, Review, and Approval Process for pilot counties Fresno, Placer, and Santa Clara. The release activity is planned to begin at 5:00 PM on December 15, 2025, and conclude at 6:30 PM. During this scheduled outage, users in pilot counties will not be able to access the CARES RFA application.

CWS-CARES Release 0.17.1:

The purpose of this release is to primarily deliver fixes for known issues, enhancements to behind-the-scenes functionality and security improvements to CWS-CARES Resource Family Approval (RFA) Application Submission, Review, and Approval Process.

CWDS is excited to share the new RFA features that are planned to be available following the implementation of CWS-CARES Release 0.17.1 on December 15, 2025, to the CARES-RFA Pilot County users. These new features are derived from user feedback as well as project planned enhancements.

RFA Application Process:

The RFA Application process is the Receipt, Record, Submission, and Assignment of an Application. The RFA Application process was selected as the first software build for CARES. CARES will ultimately replace the legacy Child Welfare System CWS/CMS. The RFA Application Process will operate in a totally new Production Environment without integrating with other legacy systems, such as the CWS/CMS and CARES-Live applications.

RFA Application Process Features:

• Allows an applicant or County staff member to initiate an emergency or standard application to become a resource family home
• Creates a facility profile that tracks required information to complete this process, including background check results, completion of orientation and training hours, physical home assessment, and family evaluation
• Aggregates information into a report to recommend approval or disapproval of a resource family application

Action Required

RFA Pilot County users review new features in the CWS-CARES Production Environment after December 16, 2025.

All prior Release Notes can be found here: RFA Application Process Release Notes and Interim Processes

All SPOCs, Technical Contacts, and SBC Administrators:

The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled maintenance on Saturday, December 27, 2025, 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.

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, December 20, 2025, at 8:00 PM and concludes on Sunday, December 21, 2025, 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.

All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:

To assist counties with cleanup of CWS/CMS user accounts and to correctly determine the number of accounts needed in CWS-CARES, an automated approach to deactivate inactive CWS/CMS user accounts has been proposed with System Change Request (SCR) 9039. To align with CWS-CARES user account administration, the SCR will deactivate user accounts that have not logged into CWS/CMS within the previous 90 days. Of the current 30,700 active user accounts in CWS/CMS, approximately 8,900 accounts have not logged in within the previous 90 days.

Important notes regarding this proposed automated process:

• All User IDs (active and inactive) will be migrated from CWS/CMS to CWS-CARES;
• The SCR will be developed outside of traditional CWS/CMS Release timelines;
• It is expected that a large first-run for deactivating CWS/CMS User IDs will be followed by a smaller run prior to moving to CWS-CARES;
• A county can change a user from inactive to active within CWS-CARES once migrated (provided a valid current email is used);
• Once CWS-CARES is live, the user accounts will automatically be deactivated if the user has not logged in a 90-day period.

Exact details on the functionality of the SCR are still being developed. Design and development is expected to be completed by the end of December 2025. After internal testing, the change is anticipated to run in the CWS/CMS production application by the end of January 2026. Updates will be provided as the details and schedule are finalized.

Action Required

Send questions and/or concerns regarding this automated process to the Data Quality portal’s mailbox at CWSDataQuality@otsi.ca.gov.

CARES SPOCs, Implementation Coordinators, OCM Coordinators, County Leadership, Tribe Leadership, Probation Leadership, and State Leadership:

In this Weekly Digest (click the link for more information): 

• CWS-CARES Progress and Engagement Summary: November 
• Reminder: Product Demonstrations Now Available on the CWDS Website 

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CWS-CARES Progress and Engagement Summary: November 

The November Progress and Engagement Summary is now available on the CWDS website. Each monthly summary includes the following data from the previous month: 

• Participation rates for key meetings 
• A list of product demos and topics covered, by date 
• Updates from teams across the Project   

We encourage you to review and share the November CWS-CARES Progress and Engagement Summary with your teams. 

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Reminder: Product Demonstrations Now Available on the CWDS Website 

Core Constituent Demonstrations are now available to view on the new Product Demonstrations Page on the CWDS Website. Access requires logging in with your organization’s email address. 

Core Constituent Demonstration meetings will be scheduled at least two weeks in advance of the session with clear agendas in the invitations. Changes to the agenda will be communicated at least two days prior to the session. 

These updates are a direct result of your feedback to enhance the process of accessing Core Constituent Demonstrations. Thank you for your continued partnership! 

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Share Your Feedback and Subscribe 

Thank you for following our progress! Share your feedback on this CWS-CARES Weekly Digest here: CWS-CARES Weekly Digest Feedback Form. Subscribe to future issues here: CWS-CARES Weekly Digest Subscription Form.  

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Action Required

We request that all CARES Single Point of Contacts (SPOCs) and Implementation Coordinators coordinate and distribute the CARES Weekly Digest to all staff impacted by CWS-CARES, at their discretion. 

All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:

IBM has completed testing of Windows 11 24H2 with the CWS/CMS application. They discovered no issues and are now supporting this version of Windows. The officially supported versions of Windows are now:

• Windows 11 24H2 (supported through October 12, 2027)
• Windows 11 23H2 (supported through November 10, 2026)

IBM is updating the CWS/CMS image with the latest patches which will be distributed soon for Dedicated Counties that request it. Dedicated Counties may request the image by submitting an IBM Help Desk ticket at 800-428-8268.

Action Required

Counties need to update all of their CWS/CMS workstations to a supported version.

What is Impacted: CWS/CMS Application

On Friday, December 19, 2025, from 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM, the CDE Interface will run to update Education Provider information for public schools, private schools, and school districts in the CWS/CMS application. This update applies to CDE school information only. School information manually created by a CWS/CMS user will not be affected. During this time, users may be unable to perform Education Provider searches in the CWS/CMS application.

Due to differences in data and formatting between CDE and the CWS/CMS application, some otherwise valid Education Providers may be end-dated.  If this occurs, please refer to the Work Around section below. A list of all end-dated Education Providers will be sent to the SPOCs via email as soon as they become available.

Work Around
If an existing CDE Education Provider has been end-dated because of this process, users will need to conduct a search for the current Education Provider and create a new Education Notebook for the client.

Contact
CWDS Customer Relations

All CARES-Live and CARES-RFA County Administrators:

REMINDER: The CWDS CSM Portal hosted by ServiceNow will be migrating to a secure FedRAMP-compliant data center. As a result of this migration, the CWDS CSM Portal URL will change. This migration will specifically affect the CARES-Live and CARES-RFA administrators who currently use the portal. After the migration, administrators should continue to submit tickets for CARES-Live and CARES-RFA at the new URL.

What FedRAMP compliance means:

FedRAMP is a U.S. government security standard that ensures cloud services meet strict controls for protecting data, access, logging, encryption, and incident response.

Why this matters:

This migration enhances the portal’s security and reliability, reduces the risk of unauthorized access or data loss, and aligns the service with federal standards for handling sensitive information.

Migration Details:

• Date: December 10, 2025
• Time: 12/10/25 6:00PM to 12/11/25 8:00AM
• Downtime: The CWDS CSM Portal will not be accessible during the migration window.

After the migration, the current URL, https://cwds.service-now.com/csm, will redirect users to the new portal location until January 10, 2026. Please note that the current CWDS CSM Portal URL will be completely decommissioned on January 11, 2026.

New URL:  https://cwds.servicenowservices.com/csm

Action Required

Please update all URL bookmarks or references to the new link after the migration date above.

If users experience any issues with the CWDS CSM Portal URL after the migration window, please contact the CARES Service Desk through the CWDS ServiceNow Customer Support Management (CSM) Portal (if able to log in). 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.