What changed, by date.

People, grades and classes from PowerSchool

• People from PowerSchool: install Beacon's plugin in PowerSchool, save its client ID and secret on Admin › Import, preview, and sync. Staff and students come in with their school, grade level, student number, homeroom and the current term's classes, and stay current every night. Read-only, with view-only access to the fields the plugin lists. The guide.
• On every ticket: under Requester, a student's grade, student number, homeroom and schedule, period by period with room and teacher; for a teacher, the classes they teach.
• Admin › Users: filter by PowerSchool students or staff and by grade, and see a student's grade under their name. Scanning or typing a student number finds the student.

The District minimum is $900, and a promise in writing

• Pricing: the District minimum is $900 per year, down from $2,500, after a district technician on r/k12sysadmin called the old floor an automatic pass for small districts. A district under 900 students pays $900; from there it is $1 a student, less above 5,000. The tiers, the three-year lock and the no-quote, no-discount rule are unchanged. Pricing.
• Terms: if Beacon ever stops offering the service, every organization gets at least 90 days' notice by email, the service keeps running until it ends, all of your data stays exportable in open formats, and fees prepaid for the time after are refunded. Terms, section 14.

A short email address, and triage that routes the team

• Short email name: give your inbound address a short name under Admin › Settings › Email to Ticket, such as lusd@tickets.beaconhelpdesk.com. Mail to it opens tickets, replies to notifications come from it, and the full address keeps working.
• Triage routes the team: when AI triage is at least 70 percent sure and a ticket arrived without a category, it sets the category and priority and now also sends the ticket to that category's team. Below that it leaves suggestions for a technician to accept with one click.
• Help center: the tickets guide now says what triage applies on its own.

Devices and people from Google, Microsoft and Mosyle

• People from Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra: staff from your directory become people in Beacon, with their title, phone and site, refreshed nightly. Map org units, departments or groups to sites and roles on Admin › Import, preview, then sync. A Google Admin connection made for Chromebooks asks once to be connected again for the directory permissions. Guide
• Devices from Intune: every device managed in Microsoft Intune becomes an asset, matched by serial number, refreshed nightly on your Microsoft Entra connection. Use Google for people and Intune only for devices if that is how your district works. Guide
• Devices from Mosyle: every iPad, iPhone, Mac and Apple TV in Mosyle Manager becomes an asset, with its Mosyle asset tag, model and school, on your district's own Mosyle API token. Lost Mode shows as Lost; Shared iPads never get a holder. Guide
• All three are read-only, start with a preview that changes nothing, and never delete a device or a person.

Try a request form as your staff will

• Portal forms: a request a technician or an administrator sends from the portal follows the department's form settings, as a teacher's does: the title built from a question or a template, the description composed from the answers, and only the questions requesters see. Build a form in Admin › Categories, open the portal as yourself, and send one.
• Admin › Categories: when the question a department's titles are built from is deleted, the Title question picker asks for a new one.

Private teams, department email addresses, a status page

• Private teams: a team can be marked private in Admin › Teams, or when a department is created. Its tickets are read by its members and the owners; nobody else, technicians included, sees them in lists, counts, search, reports, Ask Beacon, exports or the audit log. Administrators read them under one switch in Admin › Settings › Tickets, on by default so an administrator can cover HR when its only member is away; off, HR's tickets stay with HR. Tickets in a private team are assigned to its members only. How private teams work.
• A department's own email address: give a category an email key, and mail to district+key@ your Beacon address (or key.district@) opens the ticket in that category, so its team, priority and SLA apply, and a private team's visibility with them. Admin › Settings › Email to Ticket lists every department's address with a copy button. Department addresses.
• Portal forms: a date and time question type, shown on your district's clock whatever the device is set to; and per-department form settings: the ticket's title taken from a question or a template, "What happened?" and the asset tag hideable, the description composed from the answers.
• Replies reopen pending tickets: when a requester replies to a ticket that is pending, it goes back to open (Admin › Settings › Tickets, on by default; tickets on hold are left alone).
• Printed labels: the holder's name and the location can be printed on asset labels, each a switch at print time.
• Status page: beaconhelpdesk.com/status shows 90 days of measured availability for this website, the app and the API, each one's state right now, and any incident we have marked, from the checks that run every five minutes from outside our own hosting. The page says how the figures are counted. The API serves the same page without any script, for the day this website is the thing that is down.
• Admin › Users: tick people on the list, or select everyone who matches a search or filter, and delete them in one go, by the same rules as deleting one person: never yourself, an owner only by an owner, and someone who requested tickets is deactivated instead so their tickets keep their requester. Two new filters: the people a particular import added, and people who have never signed in. Admin › Import links a finished users import to the people it added, so a test roster can be reviewed and removed in a minute.

Locations, printed labels, a help center, an About page

• Devices in locations: a device can be assigned to a location (a room, a cart, a closet, a lab, an office) as well as to a person. Where is it and Who has it are separate on the device page. Naming a room on a device, at check-in, in an import's Room column, in the scanner's Place mode or on a bulk move creates the location at that site; Admin › Sites lists each site's locations. The Assets list filters and groups by location, and selected devices move together with Move to location. Guide.
• Printed asset labels: a Code 128 barcode of the tag, a QR code that opens the device, the serial, make and model, and your district's name. One label from a device's page, many from a selection on the Assets list, every new device after an import, or one after each scan at a service counter. Dymo 30252 and 30336, Brother DK-1201, Avery 5160 and 5163, or a custom size. Guide.
• Ask Beacon never ends in a bare error: when the AI is not available, does not answer in time or cannot turn a question into a report, the box says so plainly, shows ordinary search results for the words in the question, and gives a request ID to quote when writing in. Details.
• Help center and Help menu: a guide per topic, written from how Beacon works, with a search box; a Help menu in the app's top bar links to the guides, to this page, and to Email a person, which addresses hello@beaconhelpdesk.com with your organization and the page you were on in the subject. The welcome email and the dashboard's first-run panel link there too.
• Site: an About page that says who makes Beacon, how support works and how agreements are signed, and this changelog. Every footer links to the help center, the About page and the changelog.
• Chromebooks from Google Admin: a per-district option on the card, off by default, to also assign a device to its most recent Google user when the Admin console has no annotated user. A device somebody holds changes hands only when its most recent user changes, and the trade-off is stated on the switch: a shared device may be reassigned as people sign in. The sync also puts a device in a location when the annotated location names a room ("Lincoln High School - Room 204", or "Cart 3" at the device's own site).
• API: api.beaconhelpdesk.com answers its front door with what it is, where the documentation lives and where the health checks are, instead of "not found".
• Documentation and site: state plainly what Beacon does not sync: SCCM, Intune, Jamf, and rosters from Clever or ClassLink.
• Home and K‑12 pages: general claims replaced with specifics from the product.

Three pages and a dashboard that follows your progress

• Site: Chromebooks from Google Admin, Free help desk for schools and Importing from Incident IQ.
• Dashboard: the first-afternoon panel now follows what a district has actually done (sites, people, devices, the first ticket, the portal) and the onboarding emails follow the same progress.

Imports without an email column, no captcha

• Users import: when a file has no email column, Beacon builds addresses from an ID or name column with a pattern you confirm on the preview.
• Email setting: a district can keep everyone its imports added (students and staff from a file) out of Beacon email. They still get in-app notifications.
• Sign-up: no captcha on any plan. District web filters blocked the challenge script.
• Google Admin card: shows Beacon's client ID for a Workspace that allow-lists third-party apps.
• Site: the demo district form sits in the K‑12 page's hero.

Sign in without naming your organization, durable delivery, 70 fixes

• Sign-in: email and password, or Continue with Google, without naming an organization first. Single sign-on matches a linked identity before an email address, and people can link their Google account themselves.
• Delivery: notification email and webhooks go through a durable outbox, so a restart never loses one.
• Data rules: asset tags, team names and site codes are unique ignoring case; one knowledge-base vote per person.
• Scale: ticket search and report volume stay fast at 50,000 tickets.
• Ask Beacon: single-number questions work; an unknown name narrows to nothing instead of everything.
• Imported history stays quiet: old resolved tickets import closed, and nobody is emailed about them.
• SLA due dates are computed in your organization's time zone, not the server's. Rate limits count per person, so a district behind one network address is not treated as one client.
• Quality: 70 fixes from a role-by-role sweep across tickets, assets, knowledge base, admin and the portal: a staff CSV without a role column no longer turns technicians into requesters, text contrast meets WCAG AA, ticket lists are readable at tablet widths.

Chromebooks from Google Admin, paste imports, invite links

• Chromebooks from Google Admin: a Workspace administrator connects once; every Chrome device appears as an asset and refreshes nightly, read-only, keeping technicians' edits.
• Import: paste rows from a spreadsheet instead of uploading a file.
• Accounts: invite links and self-serve forgot-password; sessions issued before a password change stop working; resend-invite reports whether a mail went out.
• Fixes: dropdowns that could not be clicked; ticket edits to site, category, team, device and tags no longer fail.
• Pricing: the Founding Districts discount was retired. Prices are the same for every district.

Look inside a demo district

• Site: email yourself a login to a made-up district with sample tickets, devices and people. It is deleted after 14 days.
• Settings: a searchable time-zone picker for sites and the organization; unknown zones are refused.

Facilities, how districts buy

• Site: a facilities page and how districts buy. The $2,500 minimum covers the IT help desk, 1:1 devices and facilities work orders together.
• Sign-up: district pilots skip the captcha check, because district filters blocked it.

Pilots start with sample data

• Sign-up: a district pilot starts with sample sites, people, devices and tickets loaded, and a welcome email with a plan for Monday.

K‑12 page, Google sign-up, first-afternoon panel

• Site: the K‑12 page leads with the price, the 60‑second demo and an email-me-the-link form for people reading on a phone.
• Sign-up: Continue with Google Workspace.
• Dashboard: a first-afternoon panel for new organizations.

Terms

• Terms of Service: a use-restrictions clause. Competitor references on the site passed a comparative-advertising review.

Resilience

• API: survives database connection drops instead of restarting.

Every footer link leads somewhere

• Site: real pages behind every link, honest claims (sign-in rather than rostering, iOS through TestFlight), the on-premises edition page, security headers, a sitemap and robots.txt.
• API: an audit pass on sign-in return URLs, email links and the OpenAPI document.

Email-to-ticket

• Email: every organization gets its own address at tickets.beaconhelpdesk.com; a new message opens a ticket and replies thread back in.

First commit

• Development of Beacon began: one shared schema from the database row to the mobile screen, tenant isolation by Postgres row-level security from the first day.