Subject: Preparation and information regarding testing of personal digital certificates

You're receiving this notice because you were identified as a potential tester of Virginia Tech's new personal digital certificates (PDC).

QUICK REFERENCE INFORMATION (details below)

Why are we testing?

• To ensure a successful production deployment of personal digital certificates and digitally signed leave reports.

What are we testing?

• The enrollment process which issues personal digital certificates onto Aladdin eTokens.
• UCS, SETI, IRM, AIS and HR will test the online leave reporting system requiring a digital signature and workflow. If you are in another group, you'll be testing the certificate issuance process.
• Our communications (e.g., this e-mail) and documentation regarding this PDC project.
• The production user certification authority and token administration system.
• All testing is in the pre-production instance. We are not using real leave report data.

When are we testing?

• Beginning Friday, September 22, 2006 between 1:00-5:00 p.m. Come to AISB conference room 208 to pick up your certificate.
• Ending Friday, September 29, 2006 at 5:00 p.m. Testing may be extended if required, but we need your feedback by September 29th.

MORE DETAILED INFORMATION

This voluntary test is being conducted to help the Personal Digital Certificate (PDC) implementation team test the many interconnected infrastructure and application components of the new user certification authority (UCA). All testing is being done in the pre-production environment, which means, of course, that you do not have to worry about messing up production data.

How to pick up your pre-prod eToken and certificate along with instructions on how to download and configure the necessary client software needed for using your certificate:
http://www.dev.eprov.seti.vt.edu/

How to test entering and digitally signing leave reports:
http://www.dev.eprov.seti.vt.edu/subscriber/leavereport.html

How to test digitally approving leave reports:
http://www.dev.eprov.seti.vt.edu/subscriber/workflow.html

Don't worry if you will not be here on September 22, 2006 to get your pre-production eToken and PDC, because we're going to do this for real, with production systems and data, in October 2006. If you can participate in the test, however, the production deployment should go much smoother.

If you already have one of our Aladdin eTokens, it can be returned now or on September 22nd when you'll be issued a new eToken and PDC just for the pre-prod testing. The pre-prod eTokens will then be returned for your official, production eToken and PDC. eTokens can be returned personally to Michael Harvey of eProvisioning or left in the drop box in his office on the 2nd floor of the AISB.

All feedback, positive and negative, should be sent to

pdctest@vt.edu

and we need it by Friday, September 29, 2006 to be of use in tweaking the system for October production implementation.

--Greg Kroll, PDC Project Coordinator