web Update from Web Services

[Daniel Lange (1352906)]

I just noticed it's been a while ago we updated our members on what's going on in the Web Services. Even though it might not seem like it on the surface, we're working like ants in the background  

The progress of SANTA (new training system) is proceeding well, as always we're all working on this in our free time and on a volunteer basis, so the activity level varies a lot from month to month, especially as some have been busy with exams and similar the last weeks. We've now come to a such stage in the development that we're ready to announce some dates!

We will conduct first more comprehensive internal testing of the system as a while on 26th of June within the Web Team, this will probably discover a lot of bugs that needs squashing before our next test with Training Director & Assistants scheduled for 11th of July. This will then be followed by a alpha release in start of August. The alpha release will be a gradual recruitment process where we will allow more and more mentors to start using the system while we measure how it performs and fix what needs to be fixed - this way we avoid a "big bang" if everyone would start using it simultaneously and things break for everyone.

On a another note, we're soon ready to release our new Booking system for VATSCA that will be used to book slots at many kind of events. This will replace our old booking system for those of you who are familiar with that. The new booking system will make it for sure easier to create slots for events we couldn't before, but we really needed (FSS? ) We just need a bit more time to finish a update to Handover (our central login system) first which introduces the new VATSIM Connect login instead of SSO. You might already have experienced this different and new looking login from Vatsim if you've booked position at CTL or CTP recently.

Oh and since last update from us, you probably noticed we got a new homepage that is integrated with the forums!  I think that's all of the recent update from the Web Services!

Feel free to ask questions if you've any, and enjoy the summer! ☀