Mea culpa - Michael MacAuley

Well, what's done is done is done. Migration of all content and people from Communities of Practice is finished. We have migrated some 1,000+ communities and 100,000 user accounts. CoP will close as scheduled over this coming weekend.

Its been a gruelling three months with every weekend and almost every evening taken up with migration work since mid-January. A sterling team effort and many thanks to Liz, Michelle, Mike and Jamie for good humour, commitment and most of all, imagination.

Looking forward to three weeks off now and a bit of R&R.

OK so time to fess up I think. Huston we have a problem. Because of all this work on optimisation i.e. speeding things up, we have some slippage on the next release. I know, I know, I feel it too and I'm really very sorry about this. I'm on record as promising the end of March and it's totally a hands up situation. I realise how difficult it's been for facilitators in particular, trying to run a site without notifications.

We have had delivery of the functionality and it's on our test environment but because this is the final scheduled release there is a substantial amount of regression testing (i.e. making sure it integrates properly with the rest of the environment on Live and as many bugs as possible are ironed out). The final decision was taken to delay the release yesterday evening following advice from our technical partners PFI Knowledge Solutions and Liberata. It was a bitter pill to swallow I can tell you but we finally took the view that release of a properly tested and stable set of functions albeit late, was preferable to the potential difficulties that would result from possible instability in what we have already established.

Please don't take it out on the rest of the team. It's down to me really so vent your frustration here. We've hit one deadline and missed another. I hope the optomisation work we did to speed up the system has helped and is worth it. As always it's a matter of making decisions on priorities within the resources available. I hope you can understand. We are really frustrated as well.

The new go live date is the evening of April 20th which you might spot is a Friday so in reality that's the 23rd and yes it takes 3 weeks to run all the necessary tests. Plus we have Easter in the way.

This is co-incidently the same day I'm due back at work so if you don't hear from me in the meantime it's because I'm off radar and off to get hitched! Yes, married. Now there's a deadline you really don't want to miss! That would be the mother of all feedback forums.

In the meantime I hope you can forgive us.

There's an article out today on UKAuthorITy.com about the project. It's a good piece. I didn't really feel like I was defending Knowledge Hub in the interview but it is true that some bemoan the passing of CoP. Personally I feel it's a natural process of moving on and a timely change.

So enjoy the holidays. I know I will. See you back here on the cusp of the change over. Thanks you for your help, support and feedback over the last 3 months. The next release is something special and worth the wait. I'm just sorry it's taking so long.

Mike