| System maintenance & setup > General maintenance practices > Managing demanding system activities

Managing demanding system activities

Some activities demand enough of a PowerSchool SMS system's processing capacity to slow its performance for all users. To ensure good system performance, we recommend that the District Administrator encourage and train system users to conduct such activities at periods of low system usage, such as outside school hours. Also, the District Administrator can use permissions [>>] to control the access of specific users to demanding system activities.

Demanding activities include:

= Printing report cards in bulk, such as for an entire grade or school.
= Running a large report without careful use of filters to narrow the selection criteria [>>], such as a district-wide report. Note: We recommend that user training include the use of report filters to narrow a report's selection criteria and thus the demands it makes on a system.
= Running several instances of the same report.
= Synchronizing PowerTeacher gradebook at the start of the school year.
= Calculations such as daily attendance [>>], GPA calculations [>>], and class ranks [>>].
= Year-end processing [>>]
= Database maintenance tasks [>>] such as re-indexing

The administrator or user can schedule PowerSchool SMS to perform demanding activities at off-peak times, such as in the evening, overnight, or on weekends. Demanding activities that can be scheduled include:

= Database backup [>>]
= Running reports [>>]. High-demand reports include report cards.
= Importing data
= Exporting data
= Daily attendance calculations [>>]

Pearson
Always Learning
www.pearsonschoolsystems.com 
Tel: 866-434-6276
Email: psstechsupp@pearson.com