Where's the New Site?

In the comments to this post, one of our members made some comments about the hacking that I thought deserved a full response, but I wanted to make sure that they weren't overlooked so they'll go here on the front page of the blog.

As he said, the current website looks a little "abandoned". It was pulled together for us some years ago and it doesn't really meet our needs, and it's not easy to upgrade it. Last year, the IIBA made a decision to move to a new, integrated platform for our website, and we signed a contract with a company to provide that platform and site.

We had expected the new site to be live by now. Obviously it isn't. In fact, almost all of the development work is done, but we've run into an unexpected snag along the way.

Rather than use PayPal, our new platform actually allows us to integrate directly with our bank while still accepting credit card payments. In order to go live with it, we need to be approved for an online merchant account, and that's where the challenges began.

In order to combat credit card fraud, the credit card industry has begun enforcing a new standard for data integrity called PCI DSS. While the big organizations have had to comply with it for a while now, it has only recently begun to be enforced for online merchants of the IIBA's size, and not all merchant account providers enforce it even now. However, the one we approached does. Because this is a new process for organizations of our size, we've found it very challenging to navigate through the needed requirements and bureaucracy attached to these requirements. We felt that it was in the best interest of our members to meet these standards (and ensure that your credit card info is safe!) so we've persevered through the process. At this point, it looks like we're almost done with resolving all of these issues and will soon be able to announce the date for the cutover to the new website.

Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Body of Knowledge