Alpha phase – at present we are making sure the Dgroups 2 platform allows one to perform all activities one is used to. Dgroups is all about email: consequently most of our work now is about tuning the new platform to offer what is needed to continue smooth operation mailing list operation.

This is purely software development and testing operation: we work against a list of requirements for the new platform making sure we cover all aspects of important functionality of the existing one. The work is divided in three functional areas: email, web user interface, and user profile features.

Beta test – as soon as we complete all the major features, we’ll open up the platform for an increasing number of existing Dgroups users to look around, try new things, see how their groups will look like.

At this stage, the platform will have all major functions available, but those will be rough around the edges. We’ll continue polishing and working as you look around. We’ll all communicate a lot about what you like or not and whether we’re missing something crucial that the majority of you were able to do with the old system. During this period, we’ll provide you with a copy of your data from the live Dgroups site, but only to look at – you will still use the existing live site to run your groups.

If you are feeling good about what you see and are tolerant towards technology, go ahead and create a few new groups using the new platform. Sure, it won’t be 100% finished, yet it won’t be crashing either.

Transition – when we’re sure it all works well, we’ll ask you not to create new groups on the existing live site, but to use the new one. Existing groups might still function on the old site for a while, but all new stuff goes through Dgroups 2. At this stage, we’ll have full support in place, all email messages will pass through the new platform and continue to the old one – thus the new one will be a mirror of whatever is going on with the current platform.

We want to give you some time to check the new platform and look around, learn the basics without pressure – your important groups will continue to run on the existing platform you already know so well.

Switch – once you get to know enough of the new platform to send and receive messages, approve new members, add resources, …, we’ll just flip the switch and immediately the new platform will start sending messages instead of the old one. All messages will already be there, we’ll copy all resources in advance. No downtime.

The Great Beyond – on February 20, 2009, we’ll shut down the old Dgroups system forever. That day on, we’ll work hard on new and exciting things to make Dgroups the best place on the Internet for international development community to conduct their dialogue.

Yahoo.com leads the pack (among the top ten, there are also yahoo.es and yahoo.co.in), with Gmail on the rise taking over from Hotmail this year. It’ll be interesting to see whether we will continue to vote for Gmail with our account choices, or will Yahoo manage to court us back.

Notable also is the  CGIAR taking over the World Bank’s 5th place in 2008 – a recent post shows one of the ways the CGIAR uses Dgroups.

Our migration team is using this hierarchy to simplify communication. Our top-level group, ‘Migration to D2’ deals with general communication around migration. This group also serves as the entry point for all people we’re involving in the work around the migration process. Yet, we have some specialized topics, like data analysis, observations on the behavior of the new platforms, meeting coordination, and similar. For these specific topics that include only a subset of people involved, it makes sense to treat them separately. This is where the hierarchy comes in: we dedicated a sub-group for each of the specialized topics.

The interesting part is how the platform deals with hierarchy membership: all members of the sub-groups are always members of their parent groups, all the way to the top. If we invite someone to a sub-group, that someone is automatically a member of the parent groups (but not the sibling groups). Membership always propagates upwards. 

Conversely, an administrator of a group is automatically administrator of all sub-groups. Of course, one can assign a new administrator of a subgroup, who in turn can administer all sub-groups of that group, but is only a member of all parents. 🙂 Quite a mouthful to say, yet simplifies user management greatly.

There is no limit how many levels of sub-groups one wants to create, except maybe in practicality of writing an URL that is 1000+ characters long. Each group still gets its own mailing list and a document library, and outside of the URL and membership rules, it behaves like a top-level group.

Here are a few notable changes you’ll see with Dgroups 2.0 platform; a short list for now, with more detailed blog posts to follow soon:

• You can change your email address whenever you feel like!
• Hierarchical groups – any group can have as many sub-groups as needed to support hierarchical nature of your collaboration.
• Stronger focus on self-service – much more things to pass on to members and admins: invitation emails to let new members fill their own profiles; online requests for group creation …
• Some terminology changes: creators will become coordinators to better reflect their role.
• Great search engine with support for faceted filtering.
• Tighter integration between email and web – in addition to mailing lists we’re used to, there are other things you can get email from and email to (and rss as well).
• Full support and product management – we intend to provide first- and second-level support for everyone – depending on organization’s and coordinator’s policy, of course.
• We’re aiming for 99.99% uptime.
• Your data will move to Switzerland, to a secure hosting center approved by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission.

Our strategy for the migration is to keep your ability to do things the same as before and remove as many limitations as possible. Dgroups 2.0 is first about letting you conduct your Development through dialogue in a smooth manner and get technology out of the way as much as possible.