June 24, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs, Technical Contacts, CWS Directors, and Probation Chiefs:
In order to support the technical solution for the CARES V1 Pilot, CARES V1 migration, data conversion, cutover, and transition efforts for CWS-CARES, the CWDS Executive Leadership Team (ELT) has decided the following release criteria and cadence for CWS/CMS:
Release 9.0 (VB6 to C# Migration)
- The ELT approved an indefinite pause on the full production implementation of the C# version of the CWS/CMS application.
- Release 9.6 will be the final version that will be retrofitted and tested within the C# code base.
- CWS/CMS production releases will continue to be deployed in the VB6 codebase for Releases 9.6, 9.7 and 9.8.
Release 9.6
To support the CARES Pilot readiness activities, the CWDS ELT decided to postpone the CWS/CMS Release 9.6 by three months, originally scheduled for Saturday, May 17, 2025.
- The goal of this release is, Improved CWS/CMS Data Quality in Preparation for Import to CARES, Phase 3.
- Development and VB6 code base testing have been completed successfully.
- C# code base County Test Workshop (CTW) is scheduled between June 23rd and June 27, 2025
- The new CWS/CMS Release 9.6 Go-Live date is August 16, 2025.
Release 9.7 (CARES V1 Pilot Technical Solution)
The CWDS ELT has decided to dedicate the CWS/CMS Release 9.7 to the development of the CARES production pilot technical solution.
- SCR 9032 – CARES Production Pilot Technical Solution
- Release 9.7 is tentatively scheduled to Go-Live in December 2025.
Release 9.8 (Projected final CWS/CMS Release)
The primary goal of this release is to develop a technical solution that places CWS/CMS in read-only state during the CARES V1 stabilization period. The code will be developed, tested, and activated when needed.
- SCR 9003 – Place the CWS/CMS in a Read-only State
- Release 9.8 will be finalized and ready for deployment ahead of the CARES Statewide Go-Live.
Please note: System Change Requests (SCRs) for improvements will no longer be implemented with CWS/CMS and will roll over as considerations for CARES development and functionality, if applicable.
Interim Releases will continue during the freeze period to address bug fixes and forms template changes, for example. The frequency will be variable, as required, or on an as needed basis.
Action Required
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Customer Relations.
No action is required.
June 24, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) will perform an upgrade to the CWS/CMS and CARES-Live production databases during the Preventative Maintenance (PM) window on Saturday, September 6, 2025. The PM window begins at 6:00 AM and ends at 9:00 AM. Both the CWS/CMS production application and the CARES-Live production application will be unavailable to all (direct access or remote access) during this maintenance window.
CWS-CARES RFA will not be impacted by this upgrade.
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: 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.
June 23, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
The CWDS Infrastructure team and IBM will be upgrading all of the CWS/CMS gateway servers throughout the state from Windows 2016 to Windows 2019. Due to the redundancy within the network, there is no anticipated impact or performance issue for the CWS/CMS user. This upgrade needs to occur on the gateway servers before Windows 2016 goes out of support by Microsoft in January 2027.
To minimize any potential impacts, only one gateway server will be upgraded at a time. Also, gaps have been scheduled between the upgrades to allow time to analyze the impact to the remaining servers within the system. All upgrades will be performed outside of normal business hours.
The upgrades will be performed through four separate phases. For the first phase, one Co-Existent County gateway server will be upgraded on Tuesday, June 24, 2025, the second gateway server on Thursday, June 26, 2025, and the third gateway server on Tuesday, July 1, 2025. The first Dedicated County gateway server will be upgraded on Thursday, July 3, 2025.
There will be a gap in the upgrade schedule to allow the Infrastructure team and IBM to review the impact of the first phase of upgrades. The remaining gateway servers will be upgraded in three more phases, currently planned for September, October, and November 2025.
Communications for the three remaining phases will be sent prior to the upgrades.
Action Required
No action needed. 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.
June 23, 2025
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, June 30, 2025, beginning at 6:00 AM and concluding at 8:00 AM. During the maintenance window, the CWS-CARES Resource Family Approval (RFA) Application Submission, Review, and Approval Process will be accessible for pilot counties 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 from 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.
June 20, 2025
Communications
CARES SPOCs, Implementation Coordinators, County Leadership, Tribal Leadership, Probation Leadership, State Leadership, and OCM Coordinators:
We are pleased to share the CARES Explorer – June 2025 issue, the newsletter for staying up to date on the CWS-CARES project.
This communication is sent directly to our key stakeholders for project communications: County, Tribe, Probation, and State leadership, CARES Single Point of Contacts (SPOCs), and Organization Implementation Coordinators.
The June 2025 issue contains information on:
Project Updates: Learn about the Child Welfare Systems Branch and new changes to Letters and Notices at CDSS. Get a sneak peak of our upcoming Stakeholder Briefing Webinar on June 25, 2025. You’ll also find information on a new resource: the CWS-CARES Progress and Engagement Summary.
CWS-CARES: This issue highlights how the Project partners with Tribes with Title IV-E agreements with CDSS to shape CWS-CARES. It also includes a summary of our findings and highlights from our recent Extended User Scenario Testing (EUST) 2 period, and an overview of the feedback received on the interface between CWS-CARES and CalSAWS. We share an overview of the Court Hearing Framework, which details some new features that will be included in CWS-CARES. In this issue, you will learn about how the Project is helping to make State and County Forms work more efficient, and the upcoming training available for Forms Authors. We also share more information on the collaborative Decommissioning Planning effort by Counties and the Project and announce a new meeting series dedicated to External Systems.
Implementation: Discover how Sacramento County has created an intranet site, complete with project resources, flyers, and videos, to build enthusiasm for CWS-CARES. Learn more about the recent Intake Process Information Sessions and changes to Intake from CWS/CMS to CWS-CARES. We are excited to share the selection of the Pilot Counties and Alternates, as well as an update on the Sandbox Environment. You will also find information on the CWS-CARES Super User program, including the dates of upcoming Orientation sessions in each region.
We recommend that you share this newsletter at your discretion with staff that are impacted by the changes coming with CWS-CARES.
The CARES Explorer – June 2025 issue is now available here: The CARES Explorer Vol 2, Issue 2
You may also obtain all CARES Explorer issues on the CWDS website: CARES Compass/Explorer | Child Welfare Digital Services
If you have any questions, need clarification, or have any accessibility issues, please do not hesitate to contact Customer Relations at CWS_CustRel@osi.ca.gov.
Action Required
We request that all CARES Single Point of Contacts (SPOCs) and Implementation Coordinators coordinate and distribute the CARES Explorer Newsletter to all staff impacted by CWS-CARES at their discretion.
June 19, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
To support the transition to CWS-CARES, the CARES RFA Greenfield releases will be ending soon. The product team has confirmed that RFA0.17 will be the final release for RFA Greenfield, unless a critical incident arises that requires an additional update.
- The stories in the backlog will be assessed and the needed stories will be moved to the CARES V1 project for future consideration;
- All other remaining stories will be marked with the status: “Closed – Will not do”;
- This will help ensure better alignment with CARES V1 and avoid duplicating work;
- Additionally, it will provide a stable, unchanging environment to support data conversion activities.
The CWDS project team extends its sincere appreciation to the RFA pilot counties, CARES RFA team members, County Representatives, county consultants, and members of the Product, Development, Communications, Customer Relations, and Implementation teams for their exceptional support—from the initial rollout of the CARES RFA Greenfield environment through the entire development period.
Customer Relations continues to be available to provide support for RFA Pilot Counties. Additionally, the CWDS Service Desk will continue tracking and working with the technical teams to review tickets reported by RFA Pilot Counties until the statewide rollout of CARES V1.
Action Required
No action required. Contact CWDS Customer Relations if you have any questions.
June 19, 2025
Customer Relations
What is Impacted: CWS/CMS Application
On Friday, June 27, 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.
Additional Notes:
Code Table Refresh is not required.
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
June 18, 2025
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, June 22, 2025, at 8:00 PM and concludes on Sunday, June 23, 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.
June 13, 2025
Communications
All Pilot County RFA Implementation Coordinators and SPOCs:
The CWS-CARES team has scheduled maintenance activity for the CWS-CARES production environment for Thursday, June 19, 2025, beginning at 5:00 PM and concluding at 6:00 PM. During the maintenance window, the CWS-CARES Resource Family Approval (RFA) Application Submission, Review, and Approval Process will be accessible for pilot counties Fresno, Placer, and Santa Clara.
There is no anticipated impact for CWS-CARES users. We are sharing this information in the unlikely circumstance that there is an actual impact during the scheduled maintenance window and the CWS-CARES application becomes inaccessible.
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.
June 12, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs, Technical Contacts, and SBC Administrators:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled maintenance on Saturday, June 28, 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.
