It's been a bit since we've sent out a complete update concerning the
various facets of the project. Communication (as it has been pointed out
to me) has been sorely lack over the last few days - hopefully this
blanket update will clear up some of the more common questions and provide
a bit more insight about our current efforts and where we are going with
all of this.
v2.0 Client-Code & API Documentation
What we hope to be the last beta of the client code before v2.0 full was
released to our testing group about five minutes ago.
This release includes a ton of new features as well as some new thinking
about some of the underlying structures.
Some things to look forward include;
- unencumbered, exportable encryption between the reseller and the
SRS.
- sales management and reporting tools.
- real-time and batch-mode processing.
- affiliate management and sales tracking tools (to allow OpenSRS
resellers to set up their own affiliate referral marketing campaigns).
All of the bugs that we've found in the v1.9.x releases have also been
stamped out (surely to be reincarnated as slightly harder to find bugs in
v2.0.x <g>).
We are also working on creating a better document set to outline the API
in a more definitive manner. If you have any suggestions as to form etc.,
please feel free to drop me a line.
Technical Support
I must sincerely apologize for the quality of the technical support that
we provided this week. Our main challenge has been dealing with the
overwhelming number of resellers that are interested in participating.
We have signed up more resellers so far this week than we did in the
previous ten days. Unfortunately, under this onslaught, some of our plans
have proven to be woefully inadequate. There is light at the end of the
tunnel however. We managed to increase our technical support headcount
extremely quickly this week and we now have sufficient resources on hand
to get us through the new year. More coders have been added to our
internal development team as well, giving us the luxury of being able to
focus specific people at specific tasks. This is important as it will
allow us to build a better code-base faster.
Someone provided me with some great advice today - "It doesn't matter how
far under the hood a good mechanic gets, they always take the time to step
back from the job and see who's at the pumps." The point was well taken -
as important as stabilizing the system and getting new code out the door
is, I have to make sure that we're looking at the pumps.
I'll let you know how this goes after I dig myself out from under the 200+
OpenSRS messages that landed in my Inbox today. ;)
RITE Testing
Resellers are starting to progress to the stage where they are ready to
apply for "live" status. Note that the backlog is growing, so if you wish
to go live prior to next year, you will have to schedule your tests almost
immediately. *There will be no RITE testing conducted between Dec. 23/99
and January 4/00* This is to allow for a code-lockdown as part of our
final Y2K plans. You will still be able to connect to horizon.opensrs.net
for your informal testing purposes, but no go-live passwords will be
issued for the production environment during this time.
If you wish to schedule your testing, please send an email to
"rite-test@opensrs.org" and someone from our integration team will contact
you to schedule a mutually agreeable time.
Whois
We will be opening up access to our public whois server over the weekend.
You will be able to access the array via port 43 using either the new v2.0
code or any standard whois client.
The whois service will answer to
- whois.domaindirect.com
- whois.opensrs.net
- whois.tucows.com
Feel free to pick the hostname that you like best.
Administrivia
The final touches are being put on our inter-registrar transfer policies -
it very much resembles the current Registrant Name Change policy that NSI
has in place. Nameserver transfers have been ironed out as well and are
conducted pretty much at the discretion of the customer via the OpenSRS
client.
I hope this has shed some light on our current efforts. Please feel free
to drop me a line directly if you have any questions that I haven't
answered here.
Have a great weekend, and the best of the season to everyone!
Thanks,
-Ross Wm. Rader
OpenSRS.org Maintainer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:38:00 EDT