Feature retirements

Occasionally we'll retire features that no longer offer the value they once did. This might be because a feature just isn't being used by many people, or it might be because technology has moved on and we want to focus our research and development in more up to date solutions to the problems that users have. On this page, you can find details of upcoming feature retirements.

Firefly LMS & Parent Portal

Themes

Retirement date: No option for new schools from Late 2022, aim for existing schools to have switched by Late 2023

Since September, schools have been able to enjoy our new modern theme, that offers a huge improvement on our older themes when it comes to professionalism, usability and accessibility. We still have more improvements that we want to make here to help make the move to this new theme as easy and exciting as possible for schools.

Over time, we want to move every school over to the new experience. Once that has been achieved, we'll remove older themes so we can support a single, brandable user interface that supports modern standards. This will allow us to make more improvements to the platform much more quickly, due to only needing to develop and test improvements within a single interface.

Health Check

Retirement date: Late 2022

The Health Check is a feature that is of little value since schools have migrated from locally hosted Firefly installations and so we plan to remove the option, which is confusing and unnecessary. Now that schools have Firefly Cloud subscriptions, we take care of all of this for you.

Windows apps

Retirement date: Late 2022

Given Microsoft's exit from the mobile operating systems space, we've taken the decision to retire our Windows apps, so we can focus on Android and iOS. We have very few users of these apps, so expect there to be very little impact for our customers here. We will remove the three apps from the Windows App Store, but will not automatically log users out or stop their apps from working - we will not offer product support for these going forward though and push notifications will no longer work.

RecentTV

Retirement date: Early 2023

We believe this feature has seen very low usage recently and so we intend to remove this as an option going forward. In order to avoid any unexpected impact, we will leave any existing content in place - but you will no longer be able to add new RecentTV content.

Epraise

LDAP

Retirement date: Mid 2023

LDAP has been offered by epraise for over a decade, however the technology has been surpassed by SSO solutions from Microsoft and Google that offer more convenience and security. LDAP can also be tricky to set up and support and so we plan to retire this feature in early 2023. Before we do so, we'll ensure that schools have a more configurable login screen and can use both Microsoft and Google SSO options at the same time should they wish to, in order to make the transition as smooth as possible.

SchoolPost

There are no SchoolPost feature retirements currently planned for this year.