Dear Friends,

This is the fourth in a series of messages to Choralist and ChoralTalk announcing the coming changes to ChoralNet on April 15.

First of all, allow me to express my thanks and sense of humility at the overwhelming number of responses in support of the first three messages sent. Such responses tell us that you trust the ChoralNet Board and believe it is operating in the best interests of the online choral community. Most have written that they are excited to see what the changes will bring.

We only received three messages expressing concern. That's a pretty good average. We've responded to those people in an effort to address those concerns. Change is always a little daunting and the only thing certain is that it will take some time to get used to new ways of doing things.

We hereby announce a public beta "audition" of ChoralNet 2.0. Beginning now, you may logon to:
http://beta.choralnet.org.

and begin trying out the new system. So, feel free to go onto the system and take it out for a test drive. You can register, create a personal page and link it to other places. You'll get a great "under the hood" look at some of issues we've been dealing with. Some of the crazy bogus posts created to test the system may give you a chuckle or two. Anything you do - including individual user pages - will be wiped out prior to the actual April 15 opening, so go ahead and have some fun. Some of our more avid website users and already begun to play with it because we posted the announcement there yesterday. Don't be afraid to throw suggestions into the suggestion box.

Allen Simon, our webmaster, has created some help pages to ease the transition. Those can be found at: http://choralnet.org/tour/
Your ChoralNet board of directors, manager, and webmaster are all standing by to answer questions and attempt to assist you. We await your input. See you there!

JDF
Dr. James D. Feiszli, Director of Music
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (http://sdmines.sdsmt.edu/music)
President, ChoralNet
605.394.5101 (office)
605.415.6829 (mobile)