This year, the Ed-Fi Alliance tech team has been working through a backlog of improvements to the Ed-Fi Data Standard and technology suite (roadmap).
Data Standard
The Ed-Fi Data Standard version 5.0 brought in some key breaking changes along with non-breaking additions. In keeping with the planned release cadence, no breaking changes are being introduced to the Ed-Fi Data Standard in 2024. In the spring, along with the ODS/API 7.2 release, we released version 5.1 of the standard, with new support for crisis event tracking, student immunizations, and transportation. Version 5.2, coming this fall, will focus on improvements to the following domains:
- Assessment registration
- Assessment accommodation
- 504 plans
- Special education
- National school lunch program
.NET 8 Support
Microsoft has established a biennial lifecycle for major versions of .NET, the software development framework on which we build most of the Ed-Fi Alliance technology suite. .NET Version 6 will fall out of support in November 2024. Many agencies have a policy prohibiting running software that uses out-of-support libraries like this. Thus, upgrading to .NET 8 (valid through November 2026) was our highest priority for the year’s product releases. The following software releases include the support for .NET 8, in addition to other bug fixes and improvements:
- ODS/API 5.4 (last planned release for ODS/API 5.x)
- ODS/API 6.2 (last planned release for ODS/API 6.x)
- See Ed-Fi ODS/API and Data Management Service FAQ for more about the ODS/API support timeline
- ODS/API 7.2
- API Publisher 1.1
- Admin API 1.4
- Admin API 2.2
- Admin App 3.3 (last planned release for Admin App)
- Data Import 2.3 (last planned release for Data Import)
- Note that Data Import will go out of support in summer 2026
Coming Soon
In November, the new ODS/API 7.3 will add support for the Ed-Fi Data Standard 5.2 (described above) and enhancements to the data authorization functionality:
- A new system for granting more granular permissions to access student data, for example, restricting access by grade level or by program enrollment.
- And for the applications connecting to the ODS/API, more detailed information about what permissions have been granted in that specific instance. This is useful when a vendor has connections to many different organizations’ ODS/API applications, where they may have different permissions in each system.
Admin API 2 is used by education organizations and platform hosts to manage their ODS/API 7.x deployments. In Q4, it will be enhanced for greater control over multi-tenant ODS/API deployments and to add paging capabilities to its API query support for better application integration performance.
And, work continues on the new Data Management Service that we announced in the previous blog New Cloud-Native Functionality Coming to the Ed-Fi Alliance Technology Suite. At this time, we are working to provide a “beta” preview release before the Ed-Fi Alliance Summit 2024, which will demonstrate basic compatibility with the ODS/API. This will be followed by a fully functional release candidate version in spring 2025. Those interested in following the progress of the new applications can watch the project announcements page in GitHub or reach out to me at [email protected].
