You will be aware that we are in the process of upgrading the NBN Gateway and that we recently released the first phase on a test website. Throughout the upgrade process, we have been communicating directly with many of you, as well as through the NBN website, the NBN Gateway itself and through NBN eNews. We are committed to maintaining this communication and can now update you further.
Whilst the first release of the new site has been made available for testing, we have encountered some technical problems resulting in slow performance and unfortunately, we are currently unsure of how long these problems will take to resolve. Our priority is to ensure the availability of a website that performs well and which allows you to access and manage the data you require. With this in mind, as of 19th February we have re-enabled the FULL functionality of the “current” NBN Gateway at http://data.nbn.org.uk This means that data providers will once again have full dataset and organisation administration abilities, and users will be able to set up new accounts, apply for access and comment on records, and these changes will be carried over to the new NBN Gateway when the current performance issues have been resolved and it is ready for full release.
Please note the following:
• Please only apply for and grant full access, i.e. full resolution with attributes and recorder names, because ‘intermediate’ access will not be carried over to the new Gateway.
• Outstanding access requests will not be carried over to the new Gateway.
• The ability to apply for full access to specific records by applying taxonomic, geographic and date filters, or to apply for access to multiple datasets with a single request will be available in the new Gateway. Therefore, unless your request is urgent, you might prefer to wait until the new Gateway is released before making your access requests.
We will resume data loading on the current site for any data sources that need to be loaded urgently. Such datasets will be available online towards the end of March.
Web services will continue to be run from the “current” NBN Gateway and Web service users will not notice any change in performance and do not need to take any action.
Re-enabling the “current” NBN Gateway will give us the time to resolve the performance issues with the new site behind the scenes, whilst allowing you to continue to use a fully functioning NBN Gateway. We only intend to release the new version when it is fully operational and stable. The “new” NBN Gateway will continue to run on the test site, so you can still give us feedback and see how it is developing as we move forward.
The technical issues we have encountered are frustrating, but we remain certain that when we have overcome them and when the rollout is complete, the new functionality will enhance your experience of using the NBN Gateway.
If you have any queries please contact the technical team for help on access@nbn.org.uk
Thank you for your continued support.