We are rescheduling the production deployment of the new InCommon Discovery Service for January 5, 2011, rather than the December 15 date previously announced (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/5IIaAQ). The DS depends on a new hot spare server, which is coming online on December 15 (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/mwIjAQ). Due to this infrastructure change, the deployment of the production DS has been delayed.
The production Discovery Service will be deployed at a new URL, which is different than the URL of the InCommon WAYF. The FAQ (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/FgEFAQ) shows how to reconfigure your software to use this new URL. We recommend that you do this as soon after January 5 as possible since we plan on making a permanent cut-over to the new Discovery Service on February 2.
This new schedule allows us to extend the time for feedback. Please visit the test service (https://service1.internet2.edu/test) and send any comments or suggestions to discovery@incommon.org by January 3, 2011. We have already received some valuable comments from a number of organizations, including UMBC, NCSA, UCLA, and the Trondent Development Corp. We look forward to receiving your comments, as well.
We will incorporate as many of your suggestions as possible into the service deployed on January 5. The desire for an incremental search interface has been heard loud and clear, but that feature (and some others) will require more time to implement and test. We have decided to release the production service without such features so that we can support those who wish to migrate to SAML V2.0 (which the old WAYF does not support).
For complete information about this new service, please visit the FAQ at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/FgEFAQ.