For those of you using adCenter, you should have already received notice about the release of the v5 API. If you haven't drop us a mail to us at adplate at microsoft! I won't go through all the details of the upgrade here, this is a major release for us. It contains some great improvements such as 'Retrieving Objects by ID', 'Negative Keywords', Superior Error Reporting, and many, many others. Perhaps most key is the normalization of Object naming to match the adCenter GUI and the industry standard. We'll be supporting v4 and v5 in parallel for 180 days to ensure that everyone has a comfortable upgrade window.

Key Dates:

  • v5 Documentation Available - Nov 07
  • v5 Release to Sandbox - 23 Dec 07
  • v5 Release to Production - 14 Feb 08
  • v4 Retirement - 12 Aug 08

We have a couple of great resources available to help with migration: the v5 Release notes on MSDN, and also a series of 'Open Sessions'. These Open Sessions are 90 min long meetings dedicated to helping users migrate - first 30 meetings preso, last 60 minutes Q&A. The next ones are:

  • Apr 15th 1pm to 2:30pm PST
  • May 20th 1pm to 2:30pm PST
  • Jun 17th 1pm to 2:30pm PST
  • Jul 15th 1pm to 2:30pm PST

To attend, just join the live meeting (https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=P96SDC&role=attend&pw=AdCenOH). In case you can't make any of the above (or want to get an earlier start) here is the recording from Feb's session:

Cheers!,
Daniel