PriceWaterhouseCoopers – EurID
About the project
EURid is the organization that has been appointed by the European Commission to manage the .eu TLD. The launch of this new TLD will happen in several phases, during the first phase all applicants will have to “prove” their right to the domain names requested during these sunrise periods. Price Waterhouse Coopers was appointed by EURid as the independent entity in the role as Validation Agent. This Validation Agent shall handle all necessary activities in order to validate a request made and shall inform EURid of its decision (acceptation or rejection).
The necessary activities of the validation platform consist of the retrieval of the Documentary Evidence provided by the applicants to prove their prior right. Both a digital and paper flow was setup. The paper flow was scanned and digitalised by Pitney Bowes and submitted to the Validation Platform. Immediately after receiving documentary evidence a notification was sent to EURid, this to prove Documentary evidence was submitted within the allowed timeframe.
The validation process itself started by retrieving the applications placed on the work queue. Validation of the Documentary evidence was based on a well defined and audited Business Process (20 languages, users located all over Europe). At the end of the validation process the final decision was submitted to EURid.
How?
The Validation Platform was set up by Amplexor and hosted by Belgacom. The platform was set up to be high availabe and had to cope with a large loads (built to handle 1.500.000 applications and up to 70 validators).
The base platform was Documentum 5.3 and their Business Process Suite. Validation was done on a customised Webtop application. Forms were used by the validators.
Auditing and tracability of all activities was primordial. It started at the receival of the Documentary evidence by the Validation Agent until the final decision submitted to EURid was primordial.
All communication with EURid was done using Webservices over a secured network sending encrypted messages. The Advanced Business Process contains automatic routing based on language, application types as well as predfined risk levels. Based on validation results tasks were escalated. To assure quality of work a “Sampling” mechanism was set up.
The expected heavy load required us to make the necessary tunings to the workflow, webservices and setup of the application server. Reporting of the current workflow load as well as multiple overviews of completed tasks was automatically created and accessible.
Amplexor started with the setup of the platform in September 2005. In November of 2006 the platform was ready and multiple dry runs and load tests were scheduled. After the planned go Live in the beginning of December 2006 Amplexor provided additional support and implemented several change requests. In October 2006 the last applications were validated by Price Waterhouse Coopers.
