URGENT: Case Significance change

Hi everyone

Great to see most of you again at the conference - we have a quick (and unfortunately urgent) question for you:

We’ve just had a very late submission for potential inclusion in the January 2017 International edition, and I was hoping to quickly get your thoughts on it before discussing with everyone.

A large scale batch change needs to be applied to the International content as soon as possible - approximately 770,000 descriptions would had their case significance changed in order to introduce the "Entire term case insensitive” description case.

There is a simple algorithm to introduce this value: When the current case significance of a description is "Only initial character case insensitive", if there are no uppercase characters after the first character then we set the case significance to "Entire term case insensitive”.

This means that whilst the change is large in terms of number of description records updated, the change itself is relatively simple and uncomplicated, resulting in the risk of impact not being as high as it might initially seem.

During some tests that our development team ran, however, there was an impact to our automated quality assurance system, which experienced a significant delay to the amount of time it took to run - so you may experience similar issues with your validation routines and/or load programs?

Obviously the main potential impact here is for the community who might not be prepared for such a large change, and so we would like to gauge whether or not you felt it was appropriate and acceptable to include this change in the January 2017 International edition?

If you could possibly have a quick chat with your teams and let me know what their thoughts are on this (preferably by the close of play today if at all possible - sorry for the late notice), that would be fantastic?

Thanks very much,

Andrew