This week we will be deploying our sprint 126 work.  This deployment is probably one of the most complicated in a while.  Quite a lot of it actually rolled out at our Connect(); event the week before Thanksgiving and then Thanksgiving week stalled the completion of the deployments so we are just getting back to it this week.   All the ruckus around Connect(); and Thanksgiving has caused the sprint 126 deployment to run up against the sprint 127 deployment.  The sprint 127 deployment will begin to hit public rings within a week.

Also, to be quite honest, the rush to get all of our new capabilities deployed and enabled in time for our Connect(); event led to some stability problems I’m not happy about.  This is part of what caused us to be more cautious during Thanksgiving week.  We are also spending time now really looking at all the incidents we had, root causing them and figuring out how not to have it happen again.  I apologize for any down time we inflicted on you.  We’re working to adjust processes to catch issues earlier.

You can read the release notes for the sprint 126/Connect(); releases to get all the details.  The thing that should probably most jump out at you is how much there is.  It’s 43 new features and countless bug fixes and small improvements.  That is a new record for us in a single sprint delivery.

I’m not going to try to recap the highlights here because there are so many *big* improvements that I’d just end up rewriting the release notes.  I encourage you to go read them and feel free to pass on any feedback you have.

Thanks, Brian