CHAOS2

What is the next milestone on terabyte services?

Basically, we are now taking enquiries to the trials email address, and sending orders in for new installs and take overs. It is a trial simply because we don't have all the processes sorted 100% and there is more staff training and so on, but so far looks good.

So yes, don't hassle sales staff directly, use the trial email address (on that page) and we'll be in touch.

But CHAOS2 is going well.

The spec is being refined as we work on it. We have a development platform but not yet an "on-boarding" platform for customer/dealer usage. The issue is Data Protection. We can't simply have a copy of clueless on there as it only needs to be slightly our of date to have old passwords that on the live system have been changed, and so allow some access to personal data without the right credentials. It is a nightmare.

The on-boarding will be limited dummy data and dummy accounts and so on, and cleared out regularly.

Even so, progress is being made, and the system is coming together.

The design seems to work - a simple request logic, and a response that provides details of what is needed to go further. It works well to allow a generic javascript front end, but also provides a degree of self documenting interface for machine to machine logic.

There are a lot of scenarios though, and the idea is that this one system will cover all broadband ordering, replacing home::1, office::1, and old units ordering as well as ceasing, all in one system.

I think I will push for getting an on-boarding platform sooner rather than later so people can play with it and give feedback, to be honest. The more feedback we get the better we can make it!

I am trying to work out whether I should launch with limited functions for the sake of expediency, or if doing that means the rest never gets finished. Tricky. Certainly we expect to overlap with the old ordering system for a bit to be sure we have it all sorted.

As ever, one of the big issues in any system design is exception handling. We are now expecting to pin down a BT "Gold" address on orders and so need to have sales staff handle cases of porta-cabins in fields and stuff like that. We do quite a few of that sort of thing for some construction companies. Possible, but hard work and even harder to forecast broadband availability before a line is installed.

Either way, end of Jan for normal ordering of Terabyte services is my ultimate target and I hope to actually get something live well before that.