2020.03 Release Check-in

[Ethan Gates]

Greetings all!

A few weeks in, I just wanted to make a couple notes about the 2020.03 release:

1) We made a note of it in meetings and in the revised deployment docs, but just a reminder that the new UI introduced a new component into the system requirements, which is access to an SMTP mail server for sending auto-generated passwords to new users (except in the case of the initial user configured during deployment, whose password, again to highlight, is hard-coded to "eaasidemo1" - unless/until you choose to manually reset that password in the UI, in which case the SMTP server must, again, be properly configured to send the auto-generated new password to the initial user. So we recommend not changing/resetting that initial user's password until you're sure the SMTP configuration is working!!!)

This system of auto-generated passwords via email is intended as a temporary solution while SSO integration and more thorough identity management is under development - but since local mailing systems are often a complicated thing, especially in university settings, we thought we should just highlight that Google and AWS, among others, provide free SMTP servers that work well + simply with EaaSI. The volume of emails that should be generated by this system should be very small and would fall well under the free tier of most third-party services (Mailgun, SendinBlue, MailJet, etc.)

If those services are not an acceptable option, or you have any other questions about SMTP configuration, do please file a ticket or post to this list!!

2) Also keeping in mind again that many of your IT departments are likely overloaded with requests in this time, making the update + deployment process slow, we'll reiterate the offer from the last monthly EaaSI Network call to send out some invites to Yale's test server for anyone in the Network who really wants to try out the new UI in order to provide us feedback and/or complete your surveys. (Apologies to those on this list outside of the EaaSI Network, but do stay tuned for announcements regarding the future of EaaSI's hosted service testing!)

Feel free to write me off-list for details and login instructions - there will be some informal limitations on your activity (e.g. please don't publish to the Network while logged in, expect unexpected downtime, etc), but we hope this is a way we might get more eyes on EaaSI's new release, sooner!!

Best,

- Ethan