10/05/2005

More about work.

As promised, here's a bit more about what we're doing at work. I'm tremendously excited to be a part of this, and I think that it will turn out to be a very important step forward for the church as it rolls out into general production.

The project as a whole encompasses a lot of pieces: Family Search Indexing; a redesign of the www.familysearch.org home page; making more documents from 'the vault' accessible; and (the part I'm involved with) developing a new software system for organizing, performing, and recording family history and temple work.

I'm part of the infrastructure team that manages the computing and networking resources involved in running this new system. There are several people on the team (although we have a few job openings that we're still trying to fill). Right now, I'm most involved in developing processes and tools for provisioning and maintaining large sets of computers. In subsequent posts I'll try to put together some specifics about this.

There are a lot of developers hard at work on the actual system. It's been cool to see things coming together. One of the pieces that really has me jazzed is the effort that's gone into making collaboration easy. I look forward to this accelerating the work of identifying and researching our ancestors. (Again, I'll try to put together some more information about this in later posts.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd love to hear more about FamilySearch Indexing and everything else. Are you working on TempleReady online project? In fact, IS that a project now? Pres. Hinckley alluded to something new coming down the pike at Oct Gen Conf. with family history and technolgoy. Perhaps you are involved in this?
More details please!

gnupate said...

I'll try to post something on this once we finish our food storage week, but here's a short answer.

I'm not working directly on the FamilySearch Indexing, but it looks like a cool project. I hope the loosen up the restriction on being MS only though, since I don't have any Windows based computers.

TempleReady online is a component of the full system, though we don't call it that. I do work on the system that President Hinkley mentioned in his opening remarks.

The short description is that we're building a system to simplify and coordinate genealogical work, including temple work. It includes collaboration, record keeping, ordinance work, and should significantly lower the barrier to entry while improving the quality of the record.