[General-members] Consultation on Retiring Email Templates

[ARIN]

The system used for managing email templates, also known as the template processor, is used for the Shared Whois Project (SWIP) (https://www.arin.net/resources/registry/reassignments/#swip). This allows ARIN customers who reallocate or reassign resources to their own customers to report data to ARIN about these transactions to ensure that ARIN’s registry database is accurate and up to date. Currently, customers can report reassignment/reallocation data by using email templates, ARIN Reg-RWS, or ARIN Online. Specifically, the template processor is used to submit modifications for Organization, Points of Contact, and Network records.

Because there are other, more modern options available to manage the reporting of reassignments and reallocations, as well as the other email template functions, and due to the cost to ARIN and our customers of keeping the older, email-based templating system alive, we intend to retire email templates.

Staff conducted analysis of email SWIP template usage and determined that this change will impact less that 75 organizations, and we will be working with these customers directly to guide them through this transition.

We recognize that this presents a meaningful change for users, and ARIN has completed two major improvements to ease the impact prior to retiring the template processor:

- Published an open-source template processor (https://www.arin.net/resources/registry/reassignments/ostp/) on 31 October 2023 that can convert email templates to REST calls that can be consumed by Reg-RWS. This service will be a self-contained product that customers may run within their network to process templates. This is meant as a stopgap solution and, once released, will not be maintained. If customers wish to use this product beyond its initial release, they will be able to fork the repository and maintain it as their needs require.
- Deployed updates to ARIN Online on 7 August 2023 to provide feature parity with the existing template processor for reassignments.

ARIN is targeting 3 June 2024 for the retirement of the template processor. The feedback you provide during this consultation (https://www.arin.net/participate/community/acsp/consultations/2023/2023-5/) will help inform decisions about the timing of email templates. Thank you for your participation in the ARIN Consultation and Suggestion Process. 

Please provide comments to arin-consult at arin.net. You can subscribe to this mailing list at: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-consult

Discussion on arin-consult at arin.net will close on 1 December 2023. If you have any questions, please contact us at info at arin.net.

Regards,

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)