Likelihood to Recommend PowerSchool Special Education is well suited in one specific area: special education in elementary, middle and high schools. It works here due to the nature of the platform, which focuses on meeting the needs of students with all disabilities. The software offers information on specific cases, students, as well as Academics. This supports the mission of supporting all students and making it easier for educators, parents, and administration to be more heavily involved in tracking, monitoring and supporting students. When using PowerSchool Special Education, it simplifies the IEP process. Collaboration is one of the best abilities the software provides. There is a need to track program eligibility, including 501 accommodations and Title 1, and in a school with such a large population, the functionality that this software offers to users is important.
Read full review This is great for cold calling and starting clients from scratch. A lot of entry is required to build a customer profile, but if you are diligent in entering this information, then it can be extremely useful, and you will thank yourself down the road for having an organized database with as many or few details stored. It is a little more challenging for existing customers who have a wealth of information on their files because the transfer of information can be quite tedious.
Read full review Pros It provides all the documents necessary for supporting federal and state laws in regards to the special education program. Extremely effective in helping to meet reporting standards for students. Teachers that fall behind on deadlines or timelines are given reminders and provided with processes to monitor progress and reporting. Case management is easy, which leads to 100% compliance. This is important because the best strength is that this platform helps to increase funding by meeting all requirements of the Fed and State. An additional strength is the collaborative potential it offers. The platform offers student portals to let staff access all resources on demand. Read full review Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system Read full review Cons In terms of improvement, the interface is extremely ugly and simple in design, color and icon design. The platform needs to have a much more interactive and appealing interface so that use is more comfortable. For parents, their side of the platform has a lot of options. That needs to be simplified. I think less and more drop downs within the key menus would help. The disability codes are very lengthy. Perhaps there are easier or faster ways to access subsections to select. Read full review Incredibly complex to set up and configure. Multiple points of potential failure. Things Desk.com did out-of-the-box require customized code and components in Service Cloud. Front-facing community is extremely difficult to configure and comes with many limitations. No help is provided by Salesforce without expensive Premiere Support plans. Expensive! Hidden costs and development costs are going to make Service Cloud far more expensive than almost any other Help Desk provider out there. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
Read full review Usability I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Salesforce has a more than 99% uptime rate and Salesforce Service Cloud is no exception. I have never had any issues experiencing outages or service degradation when it comes to using the Service Cloud product (that I can remember). Always reliable and easy to use, I would recommend this product as your go-to for helpdesk, service desk, incident management, call center, and other business process needs.
Read full review Performance There are issues with page load performance and database performance for sure, but we are a very complex setup with a lot of automation and processing for 2000+ users so this is not surprising. We are also global, so the issue with distance from the regional servers is a problem.
Read full review Support Rating It depends on what support package you buy from Salesforce. That can be good or bad. It's highly flexible to your needs pricing wise. If you have devs on staff then don't buy support. If you don't, then sfdc offers support for a cost.
Read full review Implementation Rating We are still working through issues with the implementation. Things are also always changing so the original implementation required many changes
Read full review Alternatives Considered There is no other software on the market that is specifically focused on improving the support of special education programs. PowerSchool Special Education system has a similar interface and structure that Moodle Rooms offer; however, Moodle Rooms is for content management and student management. PowerSchool Special Education is not related to course curriculum management, it is primarily focused on special education programs. Managing special education programs can be very difficult and stressful. It is impossible to successfully comply and healthily support a special education program without tools such as PowerSchool Special Education. Even more important than what other software does do for schools and educators, this platform makes it more convenient for families. Electronic forms and parent portals make processes easier.
Read full review Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and
Freshdesk . It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
Read full review Return on Investment There is also a positive impact on ROI for the school. Utilizing this software provides the school with the ability to increase the potential it receives in Title 1 funding. Title 1 funding is a major source of funding for inner-city schools in particular. Normally, the IEP and tracking process is lengthy, filled with paper, and often takes more time than necessary. Utilizing this software speeds up the process and provides clear requirements to be met, which reduces the number of questions and confusing meetings or papers left in teacher mailboxes. I have not experienced a negative return on investment with the software, because, without it, the paper trail would be too lengthy and the process would be much more convoluted, with long meetings, long sheets of paperwork, and missed deadlines due to a lack of clear collaboration. Read full review Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation. The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features Limited to annual subscription model Read full review ScreenShots PowerSchool Unified Classroom Special Programs Screenshots Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots