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

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6 Comments

  1. Greg Kroll

    Sep 07, 2006

    See attachments (tab) for Mary Dunker's revisions

  2. Greg Kroll

    Sep 07, 2006

    Ignore my last comment.  Here is the text from Mary's e-mail regarding the pre-prod testers e-mail notice.

    I think this content is very good. The main thing I'd like to see is to arrange the items in the order in which they would be most important to the recipient of the e-mail. (Others may have different opinions on what is most important, but I would think we'd agree that the infrastructure component, which we say is not of direct concern to the user, should be last.)

    Greg, thanks very much for the draft and for letting us review.

    Mary

  3. Unknown User (rsprague)

    Sep 12, 2006

    Ignored Greg's last comment mentioned in his 2006.09.07 1441 post by removing it.

  4. Mary Dunker

    Sep 12, 2006

    I'm a bit confused on what comment was to be ignored, since it looks like it was removed. I would like for my draft to be considered, and I have another change to it:

     Replace the "public key infrastructure (PKI)" implementation team that the testers will help with the "Personal Digital Certificate (PDC)" implementation team.

     Then this note can come from the PDC implementation team, perhaps listing Greg Kroll as project coordinator. I think having someone's name on the e-mail is important.

  5. Greg Kroll

    Sep 19, 2006

    Mary's latest "shorter" version of the pre-prod testers e-mail looks good to me.

  6. Greg Kroll

    Sep 19, 2006

    On Monday, September 18, 2006 3:11 PMMary Dunker said:I created a shorter version of a proposed e-mail to the preprod PDC testers. Please read:

    see the 'attachments' tab above for the latest.
    The e-mail contains links to more detail. If people like this version, I think we still need to answer a couple of questions:

    1) Where should the testing feedback be sent? I know Lee Anne and Kevin need to get the feedback from the leave reporting, and Frank's group needs to get the feedback for the PDC issuance. Our SETI testing feedback typically goes to the SETI test group so it can be documented in Jira, so I don't know where/how this feedback is going to be documented.

    I think the communication will be simpler if we send all feedback to one e-mail address. We could let the e-mail address be either an address monitored by Greg (since he volunteered), or send it to a listserv that contains more addresses. Whatever we do, we need to be consistent so the testers will know what to do.

    2) Who should sign the e-mail? I think it needs a person's name on it, and it is less confusing (and carries greater accountability) if we use only one person's signature. I suggested Greg Kroll, but other suggestions are welcome.

    Please take a look at the note, as it needs to go out to the testers tomorrow!

    Thank you,

    Mary