[midPoint] MidPoint 3.8 feature freeze

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

MidPoint development cycle is reaching feature freeze milestone. The 
freeze is scheduled for tomorrow. This means that all features scheduled 
for midPoint 3.8 should be implemented now. The next step is a testing 
and bugfixing period followed by midPoint 3.8 release. MidPoint 3.8 
release is planned for late April or early May.

This period is ideal for the community to help with testing fresh 
midPoint code - that means code built from master branch:

https://wiki.evolveum.com/display/midPoint/midPoint+Development+Snapshot

What is new in midPoint 3.8:

The focus of midPoint 3.8 was performance and scalability improvements. 
MidPoint should be slightly faster now. But most importantly it should 
smoothly scale to millions of identities and beyond. But there is a 
price to pay. There was a significant change in the database schema. The 
midPoint (XML) schema is still compatible, but the database schema is 
not. Unfortunately, we are still working on upgrade and migration tools, 
therefore all the testing that you have to do in the meantime need to 
start from a fresh installation and re-importing all the configuration 
and data. The migration tools should be ready in a couple of weeks.

There were also some improvements in the midPoint schema. The old 
employeeType, roleType, orgType and serviceType properties were unified 
to a common subType property. This is something that we wanted to do for 
a long time and the change in database schema has finally gave us good 
opportunity to do it. Old properties are still there and they still 
work. But the new subType is a preferred method now. There are few more 
properties that has been moved in the schema such as locality and 
costCenter. They were moved up in the type hierarchy, making them more 
generic. All those changes should be almost completely compatible with 
previous midPoint versions.

On the functionality front there were improvements to user interface, 
password policies, authorizations, provisioning and other areas. Perhaps 
the best way how to follow those is to check out the issues in our Jira 
and new and updated pages in wiki. I will also document those in the 
release notes as we will get closer to the release.

As for the subscribers that have used their subscription to endorse new 
features in midPoint 3.8: we are just conducting first round of testing 
and bugfixing of those new features. Also the documentation is being 
completed. We will let you know the details of your features in next 
week or two.

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com