I'm happy to report that the scheduled system upgrade went smoothly on Wednesday, there were no major disruptions which was a positive step forward for us. After some of the glitches with recent system upgrades, the team has invested a lot of time on improving the release process and will continue to do so over the coming months to further increase system stability and reliability especially when new features are released.

What We're Working On For The Upcoming Release

The next system upgrade is due around 25 August. In addition to delivering a number of bug fixes (to be detailed in a later post) our team is focusing on rolling out the following key enhancements to Business Catalyst in the next release:

• Opening our new Asia Pacific Data Center in Sydney which will bring benefits to our Australian Partner community
• Continued improvements to the automated billing functionality for purchasing extra newsletters so that unused pre-purchased newsletters roll-over for up to 12 months from the date of purchase.
• Extending our Customizable SEO Friendly URLs by adding support for the Announcements module
• Adding more on-demand video training for Standard and Premium Partners

The Plan For the Next Few Months

A number of Partners have been requesting for more communication and transparency around our medium term roadmap. While I can't provide any definitive delivery dates, I will share with you what we've identified as our highest priorities for the remainder of 2010. These priorities are representative of where we'll be investing our engineering effort:

1. Rework of DNS Manager: Starting in September we're going to overhaul the DNS manager to make it more usable. We will also correct key bugs such as allowing non-www domains redirect to www domains and setting the www domain as default.
2. Adding Tools for Managing Client Billing: in addition to completing the workflows that support the purchasing of extras such as newsletters and disk space, we're going to be working on adding functionality to enable you to change your clients site plans directly from your Partner Portal
3. Again extending Customizable SEO Friendly URLs for Web-Apps: once we've completed the rework of the DNS Manager, the team will be able to continue implementing SEO Friendly URLs, Web-Apps is the next target.
4. Data Center Migration: this project to build infrastructure for migrating sites is unfortunately much more complex than originally estimated, we're now aiming to migrate sites from old data centers to new data centers around the end of the year

What Happened To The Wishlist?

Many of you will be asking what's happening with the Wishlist and the expected delivery dates listed next to each wish. I've taken the step of removing "delivery timeframe" column from the Wishlist because the unfortunate truth is that they've raised expectations beyond what we've been able to deliver. I also published plans for delivering new features in several blog posts that I posted earlier this year. Those too have regretfully not come to fruition.

So what happened? Looking back, we've had a tough year since the acquisition. I don't want to be making excuses but just to provide an explanation for why we haven't made progress on the Wishlist as planned:

1. We've had to invest a large amount of effort into system stability and reliability, e.g. we've already launched new data centers in New Jersey, USA and Dublin, Ireland, which of course were prioritized over wishlist requests.
2. We acquired a new engineering team to work on the platform shortly after the acquisition. While we had high hopes in the beginning that we could be releasing new features immediately, the reality is that it's taken the team a significant amount of time to familiarize themselves with BC's codebase and architecture. It's only now and moving forward into the future that we'll start reaping the benefits of this investment the engineers have made in understanding BC.
3. As a consequence of switching engineering teams, we underestimated how difficult it was to implement some of your customer requests and so we over-promised in the beginning.
4. Moving forward we need to put a greater emphasis on quality and testing to make sure that new features and bugfixes are stable which means we will be sacrificing some speed in delivering features

I'd like to close off on this topic by saying that the Wishlist has been and will continue to be a great tool by which we receive feedback from the partner community. The list will continue to influence the directions and the decisions we take, but it will not be the product roadmap. As a Product Manager it is my duty to deliver the best Online Business Platform over the medium to long term. This means looking at the big picture and taking into account a myriad of factors such as Adobe's corporate strategy, competitors' developments and so on to make decisions. We recognize the need to get the basics right first and then fully overhaul the platform over the coming years, during this time I will try to work in requests coming in from the Partner Community.

Recapping Last Weeks' Release

Just to highlight a couple of the system upgrades that are now available to you on the production environment:

Separate Layouts for Blog Post Listing and Blog Post Detail View - If you go to Admin > More Customization Options > Blog Layouts you'll see the screen has been slightly updated to give you access to the new 'Blog Post Details' Layout. The main advantage of this is that you can now publish different code in the list and detail layout, thereby customizing the two differently to integrate social media code which wasn't available before. We've also fixed detailed posts so now the post title (instead of the blog title) is shown in the browser title. The updated documentation on blogs and blog layouts can be accessed here:

• Customizing the appearance of a blog
• Publish a blog post
• Extending modules with tag attributes

New Training Videos - For those who've recently upgraded to Standard or Premium Partner Programs at Business Catalyst, we've published a brand new set of up-to-date professionally produced training videos in the Training tab of your Partner Portal. These videos are step-by-step guides designed to help familiarize you with Business Catalyst, teach you key concepts and get you started with building sites for your clients.

For the full list of upgrades and bug fixes please see my release notes published here last week. Thank you very much for reading and understanding, the comment thread is open and I will be paying close attention to approve and answer comments over the coming week.