Dear all,

The IPT development team are happy to announce that the IPT 2.0 release candidate 3 (IPT 2.0RC3) is now available for download and testing from http://code.google.com/p/gbif-providertoolkit/downloads/list

Thank you once again to everyone who has reported bugs and proposed enhancements during the testing phase. Since the IPT 2.0RC2 was released some further 36 issues have been reported and addressed (http://tinyurl.com/2dev7uu ), with a total of 159 issues now fixed since testing commenced – well done to everyone involved!

As we are approaching the 2.0 General Availability release, RC3 allows users to configure the IPT to register against the GBIF live registry and register and publish data to the GBIF network. On a new installation, after the data directory is selected, you may choose “production use”, which will ensure the IPT communicates with the LIVE GBIF registry. Once selected, this cannot be altered so please be vigilant in your selection. If your intention is to test and evaluate, please do not select production installation.

The expectation is that the 2.0 General Availability release (2.0GA) will be offered in week 3, 2011, but this will not be done without the agreement from the testing community. During that week, we will call a vote on the mailing list, to ask if anyone believes the IPT is not yet ready to use for publishing data through GBIF so please consider this during your testing. Following 2.0GA we will continue to provide corrective fixes, and will initiate discussions on the future direction and functionality of the product.

The IPT roadmap planning is primarily based on the issues reported on http://code.google.com/p/gbif-providertoolkit/issues/list

Thank you once again for all your contributions and we welcome all suggestions on how we can improve the process.

Kind regards,

Tim, on behalf of the IPT development team