Hi Graham, and all others who continue to wonder about the future of PAF5. The LDS Church's Family History Department is heavily involved in a comprehensive project to develop the next generation of a Family History Research System. I have met with them on several occasions over the past two years and can personally vouch for that fact. The scope of their design is very very impressive, but they have required that the details remain unpublished due to legal confidential agreements that they have made with a number of developers and other organizations. Until February, their development was largely what I would call in the "proof-of-concept" phase. However, in February, they released to the alumni of the Church's universities a long recruiting list of new job positions that included developers and development managers of all sorts with job descriptions that include terminology indicating that the jobs involve work on a new Family History System. The job descriptions even hint of a time line because they suggest that the positions will last about three years and then be dissolved. Basically they are asking for highly experienced LDS programmers and managers to take a leave-of-absence from their current jobs to work on a highly intensive project, and then return to their normal jobs when it is completed. So what details do I feel I can divulge without breaking my commitment to their confidentiality? I can assure you that they have done their homework on what features and design are needed for the next version. Literally many thousands of mini focus group sessions have been conducted and they have been gleaning suggestions from many on-line forums such as ours. I can also indicate to you that a major motivation behind their new development is the concern that LDS Church members are NOT participating in Family History research to the degree that is expected. Much to the chagrin of the church leadership, the majority of FH research is done by others, and since this is a particularly important aspect of LDS theology, the new development is built around the need to do something about this problem - that is motivate a significantly larger number of LDS members to become involved. Since I am involved in the software business, I can read between the lines and make a few other observations. The issue of hardware has become more challenging because not only is there the Mac vs PC problem, but Linux (UNIX) is becoming more and more popular as an alternative. So the best alternative for the future is to create a browser-based client that will be independent of which type of computer you use. So if you have not yet subscribed to an Internet broadband connection, you should begin to plan for that soon. They are adamant that the new system will have a very simple upgrade path from the current PAF5 program and our PAF databases. I noted that the new system will have a component aimed at engaging a wider range of users in FH research (i.e. more graphics, time lines, personal stories, etc.) plus a level of sophistication that will satisfy those of us who do not need to be enticed into being involved in research. Finally, I think I can say that since the LDS Church has acknowledged for many years that it is digitizing everything it can get its hands on, including records in the Granite Mountain storage facility, and it uses digital technology instead of microfilm for its records extraction programs, that the new system will use the Internet in ways that they have never used before to make information available. Without going into the details of the LDS church's purpose behind FH research, suffice it to say that much of the activity they perform is being duplicated because they cannot check for each other's work worldwide in a real time system. It seems obvious to me that there will be an effort to make it easier to share information on a worldwide basis to minimize everyone duplicating each other's efforts. I'm sorry for the lengthy message, but I have been trying to get this message across to this list for two years. Everytime someone says they have heard that there will not be any development on PAF, I get frustrated. Richard Rands President Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group, formerly the Silicon Valley PAF Users Group At 01:05 PM 3/26/2005 +0000, Graham Ward wrote: >Does anyone know if there really is a PAF-6 in development? > >Graham > > >==== PAF-5-USERS Mailing List ==== >FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service >http://www.familysearch.org/