[midPoint] Change of midPoint 2.1 development plans

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear community,

We have decided to slightly adjust the development plan for the next 
midPoint version. In last few months we have gained more operational 
experience and tested the product much better. That resulted in quite a 
lot of bugfixes and the original plan was to make a quick bugfix release 
2.0.1 during this fall. However, we have decided to go a bit deeper. We 
have realized that there need to be a more substantial changes in 
midPoint to allow it to gain the full potential. These changes are 
really something that we were looking for from the very beginning, but 
they need some schema adjustments. We see that this is the right thing 
to do. Therefore we have decided to postpone a little bit the work on 
workflows and rather focus on getting the core mechanisms right.

It looks like are on the correct way, however the scope of the changes 
that we have now it much larger than a mere "bugfix release". Therefore 
we have decided to change the release schedule as follows:

2.0.1 bugfix release - cancelled
2.1 (Coeus): reduced scope, earlier release date. The current projection 
is for November 2012
2.2 (Crius): takes all the original Coeus scope, earlier release date. 
Current projection of release date is very early 2013.

Full plan is available in midPoint Jira (as usual):
https://jira.evolveum.com/browse/MID#selectedTab=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project%3Aversions-panel

The 2.1 (Coeus) release will contain all the bugfixes originally planned 
for 2.0.1. However, the state of workflow implementation need to be 
reduced to just "experimental" as we will not not have enough time to 
finish it and test it. The full workflow implementation is planned for 
2.2 (Crius) release.

The most significant change in the 2.1 (Coeus) release is introduction 
of Mapping mechanism. Partial documentation is already available:
https://wiki.evolveum.com/display/midPoint/Mappings+and+Expressions
This change allows to use the full potential of the relative change 
model that is the base of all other midPoint mechanisms.

There will be incompatible change in the schema between 2.0 and 2.1. We 
have analyzed the situation with customers that have commercial support 
agreements and decided to address each of them individually. That means 
we do not plan to create migration scripts now as the change is easy to 
do manually for most existing deployments. It is also more reliable way. 
Therefore we have rather decided to make the change for all existing 
customers as a part of support agreement.

I hope that this plan gives you better product sooner. In case of any 
questions or suggestions please do not hesitate to contact us.

-- 

                                            Radovan Semancik
                                           Software Architect
                                              evolveum.com