February 24, 2025
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 27, 2025, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 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.
February 18, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts in Mariposa County:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled maintenance on Wednesday, February 19, 2025, beginning at 12:01 AM and concluding at 6:00 AM. Users at the listed site will experience a one-hour interruption in connectivity to CWS/CMS and CARES-Live within the scheduled Verizon maintenance window.
Remote access (e.g., Server Based Computing [SBC]) to the CWS/CMS application will not be impacted by this scheduled maintenance.
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 14, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
The CWS/CMS Workstation Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) Install Options guide has been updated to version 7.3. The date of this updated guide is February 5, 2025. IBM/Kyndryl have loaded this updated guide to the Co-Existent Counties’ shared folder (CodeDist\COTS_Software\Windows_11) If a Co-Existent County does not see the updated version in their shared folder, then review to confirm that the folder is synced to copy the files from the IBM folder. A manual sync might be needed if the automated process is not active.
In addition, the guide has also been added to the CWDS website at https://cwds.ca.gov/pages/hardware_technical_information. You can navigate to the guide by opening the ‘CWDS website’ à click the drop-down arrow next to the ‘Stakeholder Resources’ header à click on the ‘CWS/CMS User’ link à click on the ‘CWS/CMS Guides’ link listed below the “County Logon” header ( website logon is required to access this section) à click on the ‘Hardware and Technical Information’ link à click on the ‘CWS Workstation COTS Install Options v7.3’ link.
Action Required
Co-Existent Counties should review the CWS/CMS Workstation COTS Install Options guide to build their workstation image to match the settings used for the Dedicated County image.
February 14, 2025
Communications
To: Child Welfare and Probation CARES SPOCs and Child Welfare Implementation Coordinators
CC: County, Tribe, Probation, and State Leadership, and OCM Coordinators
February 14, 2025 UPDATE: We would like to notify everyone that the January 2025 Q&A (PDF) is now posted to the website. CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefings | Child Welfare Digital Services.
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February 4, 2025 UPDATE: Thank you for taking the time to attend the CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefing #2 held on Wednesday, January 29, 2025. We were thrilled to have over 557 staff participate, representing an impressive 52 of the 58 California counties, tribal communities, as well as 13 Probation offices. Your active participation and engagement were invaluable.
For your convenience, the presentation slides and recording are now available on our website at CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefings | Child Welfare Digital Services.
We appreciate the comments and thoughtful questions you raised. We captured over 137 questions during the session, and we will be publishing the session’s Questions & Answers document to the website in the next few weeks.
To stay up to date on the latest CWS-CARES project news, visit the CWDS website and subscribe to our project newsletters.
We value your continued partnership and look forward to seeing you at the CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefing #3 on June 25, 2025.
If you have further questions or require additional information, please do not hesitate to contact CWDS Customer Relations.
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January 27, 2025 UPDATE: If you registered for the session, you should have received an email from CalHHS Office of Technology and Solutions Integration with an Outlook calendar invitation attachment containing the Webinar link. Please note that this invitation will not automatically be added as an event on your calendar; you must open the Outlook calendar invitation attached to the previous email and accept it.
Registrations are still being accepted. To register or re-register for the session, please use this hyperlink: Register for January 29th CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefing Session
We look forward to your participation.
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We hope you found our first Stakeholder Briefing Session in June 2024 informative and useful. We’re excited to announce our Second CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefing Session to unveil new features, foster engagement, and drive user adoption.
Date: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Time: 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Format: Webinar
The agenda includes:
- Leadership Opening
- A Holistic Design & User Feedback Update
- Demonstrations and Feature Highlights:
- Intake & Investigations (what’s changed since the last session)
- Case Management
- The Foster Care Eligibility Determination (FCED) interface between CWS-CARES & CalSAWS
- An External Systems Update
- Implementation, OCM, & Training Updates
- Technology Updates
- Q&A
You may register for the session using the CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefing #2 Registration page.
Registration takes less than a minute by entering your name, email, and county or organization. Once registration is complete, a meeting notice with the session information will be automatically sent to the email provided.
You may register for others or forward this email to staff that might be interested in attending the session. We encourage everyone to register by January 22, 2025.
The session will be recorded. For more information, please refer to the CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefings page on the CWDS website which contains the session dates, past session recordings, and materials.
Action Required
You are invited to register for the CWS-CARES Stakeholder Briefing #2. We encourage registration by January 22, 2025. For additional questions, please email CWDS Customer Relations at: CWS_CustRel@otsi.ca.gov.
February 11, 2025
Communications
To: External Systems Points of Contact and CARES SPOCs
CC: County Leadership, CARES Implementation Coordinators, and OCM Coordinators
This email provides an update on the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary information previously communicated to External Systems Points of Contact and CARES SPOCs on September 27, 2024.
Current Status:
The CWS-CARES Data Dictionary supports counties and other data partners in understanding the structure, purpose, and usage of data with CWS-CARES. It informs decisions required for assessing external systems, potential system updates, data conversion templates mapping, and the development of county-specific forms and reports.
The initial version of the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary and legacy mapping of CWS/CMS fields is ready. This version is an evolving resource and will be updated through future iterations.
Next Steps:
- CWS-CARES Data Dictionary Webinar: The CWS-CARES Project will preview the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary and related materials with a small group of counties to gather feedback. A broader webinar session will be held with county representatives in Spring 2025. This webinar session will cover:
- Navigation of the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary
- Utilization of the support documentation
- Use of legacy mapping documentation with the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary
The webinar will be recorded and made available for those unable to attend.
- Publication & Ongoing Updates:
- The CWS-CARES Data Dictionary will be published following the county webinar.
- Quarterly updates to the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary are planned.
- Please note that the next version will include significant changes and updates, such as additional and updated legacy mapping.
Communication and Support:
A dedicated Microsoft Teams channel will be created for all CWS-CARES Data Dictionary-related artifacts. This channel will serve as a forum for sharing new versions and collection feedback. County representatives will be added to the channel following the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary walkthrough.
Questions can also be submitted directly to the CWS-CARES Technology team's inbox: CWDSDataManagement@osi.ca.gov.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work diligently to ensure the successful implementation and ongoing maintenance of the CWS-CARES Data Dictionary.
February 07, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs:
The CWDS Office and IBM have scheduled a patch update for the System Change Request (SCR) website. The patch window is scheduled for Wednesday, February 12, 2025, beginning at 7:00 PM and concluding at 11:00 PM. The SCR website will be unavailable for approximately one hour within the patch update window.
Action Required
No action needed.
January 31, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has scheduled maintenance on Sunday, February 2, 2025, beginning at 7:00 AM and concluding at 11:00 AM. During the maintenance window, there is no anticipated outage.
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.
January 30, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs, Technical Contacts, and CAD Contacts:
The CWS/CMS CAD BusinessObjects (BO) server was unavailable last night, January 29, 2025. It was rebooted this morning at 10:10 AM, and the service was restored. The Search indexing caused logging issues for the DB2. Therefore, the Search indexing has been temporarily paused until the issue is resolved. Additionally, no scheduled reports were run this morning, but the scheduler is now running and will catch up soon. Therefore, you may experience some slowness. Please check in periodically for completed reports throughout the morning.
Action Required
Review scheduled BO reports today and tomorrow morning. Rerun the report jobs, as necessary.
Please contact CWDS Customer Relations if you require more information regarding this issue.
January 28, 2025
Communications
All SPOCs and Technical Contacts:
Effective January 30, 2025, CARES-Live 2.8.32 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, January 30, 2025, 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.
Users will not be able to access the CARES-Live application during this scheduled outage.
CARES-Live 2.8.32:
- This release addresses security findings and Java upgrades 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.
