DNC Newsletter - June 2002

01 July 2002

During the past month, a large amount of activity occurred in a number of areas, as the various organisations involved in implementing the SRS increased their efforts. Important establishment work was performed for the Office of the Domain Name Commissioner and the SRS Registry. The technical implementation remains on schedule.

.nz
The InternetNZ Council considered a number of .nz and SRS related matters at their June meeting. Key decisions were made on the following:

registry fee - this will be set to $2.00 per month per domain name (GST exclusive). It was agreed by Council that this fee would be reviewed once the SRS is bedded in and this will be done by the DNC and the .nz Oversight Committee.
.nz Oversight Committee - Council appointed Richard Currey, Colin Jackson, Roger Hicks, Dr Frank March, Jennifer Northover, David Russell and the InternetNZ President (ex offico) to the Committee. It is expected they will hold their first meeting during July.
maori.nz - the establishment of maori.nz as a second level domain was approved in principle. Submissions to the DNC on implementation issues relating to the release of the new second level domain are required by 5 July 2002.

As the operational office responsible for the management of the .nz name space, the Office of the DNC has established an internet site. This can be accessed at www.dnc.org.nz. The site allows users to subscribe to the site and to receive notification of new material posted to particular categories they have selected.

Planning for the SRS implementation is now well underway and a series of presentations are planned to inform .nz providers about what has been happening and to provide guidance on preparing for the SRS. Please refer to the [outdated link] outline and timetable for further details.

New Zealand Domain Name Registry Limited
The Registry Board is pleased to announce the appointment of Nick Griffin as Registry Manager. Nick has a strong backgound in operations management and is looking forward to taking up his position on July 4. Those attending the SRS Implementation Presentation in the main centres in July will be able to meet Nick, who will be taking the opportunity to get to know the issues faced by the domain registration community.

Technical Implementation
The Detailed Requirements Specification was published following approval of the business rules by the InternetNZ Council. This is a key document for potential registrars as it identifies the transactions that will be made available to access the SRS and describes the business requirements of each. In conjunction with the Technical Architecture document, it is the basis of the application development work now under way. Unlike most project documents, this document is expected to live on after implementation, as the authoriative source of the transaction-level business rules. New versions will be published on the DNC site as they become available.

Also completed during the month was a draft version of the User Interface Specification. This will be published on the DNC web site when it is signed-off in the near future. It describes the entry-level, HTML-based user interface that will be provided as part of the Registrar Implementation Kit (RIK). Registrars with the technical capability to install the OpenSource software will have a ready-made, screen-based interface to the SRS. In practice, however, it is assumed that most registrars will require a greater degree of sophistication in their SRS interface than the manual one provided.

The Registrar Working Group received an early version of the RIK last week, in preparation for commencement of the beta-testing exercise in the first week of July. The group will install the OpenSource software included in Stage I of the RIK and connect to the SRS test system. A process has been provided for problems and issues to be logged and reported. Although full functionality is not yet available, the key transactions required to register and manage domains will be provided and the remaining transactions will be added as they are completed. The testing efforts of the group will complement a more structured and formal acceptance testing process beginning in August.

A first draft of the Migration Plan was produced recently, dealing mainly with the migration requirements for getting the SRS operational at implementation date, with Domainz as the sole, stabilising, registrar. While it deals with the operational aspects of transferring domains to new registrars as they become authorised, the name allocation process is outside its scope. Work also began on developing an Implementation Plan, or rather co-ordinating the implementation plans of the several organisations involved.

Domainz
At Domainz we are in the final stages of installing the ACCPAC financial package and about to commence the testing phase. ACCPAC will replace all the back office accounting functions currently carried out using DRS. This project is planned to go live in August.

We can signal now that there will be a few minor changes to the Domainz website as a result of this. Because the financial data will be coming from ACCPAC and not DRS, the format of the online Customer Statement will be changed. Similarly, the layout of the Transaction History page will also be different. A new feature you may find useful on each of these pages is a function to allow the details to be downloaded to a CSV file. Apart from this everything should remain pretty much the same as it is now.

We will provide you with a detailed explanation of these changes next month.

Any comments?
If you have any questions or concerns about the SRS implementation, please don't hesitate to contact us. For technical matters, contact Doug Mercer. For all other matters, contact Debbie Monahan

Please note
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