Resent-Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 02:14:30 -0400
Resent-From: FV Commerce Server 

Dear First Virtual Buyers and Sellers,

Great news!  FIRST VIRTUAL's payment processing systems were NOT
off-line on Thursday, June 20 as we had previously announced.

Our plan to migrate our systems to a more robust hardware
platform and to implement software enhancements is
progressing at a rapid pace.  We will be able to offer these
new services in the VERY NEAR future (more information below).
In order to implement these services we will need to take our
servers off-line for a few days.

************************ Mark your calendar ************************

...From Saturday, June 22 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
(0830 GMT) until Sunday afteroon (or sooner) on June 23, the First
Virtual Web site (www.fv.com) and the First Virtual InfoHaus
(www.infohaus.com) will be offline.

...From Thursday, June 27 at 4:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
(0200 GMT) until the morning of Tuesday, July 2, (or sooner)
First Virtual's primary commerce server (card.com) will be
unavailable for transaction processing.

************************ Mark your calendar ************************

WHAT EFFECT DOES THIS HAVE ON YOUR ABILITY TO PROCESS TRANSACTIONS?

On June 22nd and 23rd links to our web site (www.fv.com) and InfoHaus
(www.infohaus.com) will result in URL errors.  Buyers wishing to apply
for a Virtual PIN during this time can still send email to
apply@card.com to request their Virtual PIN.  Seller storefronts on
the InfoHaus will not be acccussible during this time.

On June 27th and until sometime on July 2nd, First Virtual's
primary commerce server (card.com) will not be able available.
As part of our regular fall-back process, our replicated inquiry
service will allow you to validate account-identifiers in real-time
(via finger or SGCP to inquiry.card.com) in order to conduct
commerce.  Prior to taking the primary system off-line, we will
re-configure our systems so that your inquiries will automatically be
serviced by our replicated server.  You will not need to make any
changes to your point-of-sale software -- as long as it sends account
status inquiries to inquiry.card.com, the re-configuration will be
entirely transparent to you.

Other services will experience delays during the 5 day period
from June 27th through sometime on July 2nd.  For example,

- The transfer messages between buyers, sellers and the commerce
server will be delayed.  PLEASE NOTE:  Your point-of-sale software,
when it determines that the primary system is unavailable, should
submit transactions via e-mail (and the Internet e-mail infrastructure
will automatically queue those messages until the primary system is
available).

- Account activations (new Virtual PIN applications) and account
maintenance will be similarly delayed.

- History requests may be lost during this process.  Please resubmit
your history request if you do not receive a response by
Thursday, 7/4.

- Payment notifications and the associated deposits will be delayed
for up to 5 business days.

We realize that this downtime may be inconvenient for you.  As
always, our goal is to provide you with top-quality service now,
and as Internet commerce grows.  We are excited about the new
capabilities these enhanced systems will allow us to provide for you.

WHAT BENEFITS WILL BE REALIZED FROM THIS CHANGE?

- Improved performance due to new systems with
     ...10 times overall capacity,
     ...twice as much processing power,
     ...one third more memory
     ...redundant Internet connectivity for greater reliability

- A change in our account fee to an annual model.  Buyers are now
charged a single annual fee to maintain their Virtual PINs instead of
being charged each time they change their credit card information.

- Many more important system enhancements and extensions will be
announced and explained after we have fully deployed and tested them.

To learn more about these new features as they become available,
subscribe to our Seller or User mailing lists.
To subscribe to the Seller's mailing list, send an e-mail message to
fv-selling-request@fv.com with "subscribe" in the subject.
To subscribe to the User's mailing list, send an e-mail message to
fv-users-request@fv.com with "subscribe" in the subject.

We use these lists to distribute information regarding
system enhancements, system downtimes, as well as other
announcements of interest to our customers.

Thank you for your patience during this maintenance time and for
your continued support of First Virtual's Internet Payment System!

Debra Gibb
Director of Operations
FIRST VIRTUAL Holdings Incorporated




From rballard@cnj.digex.net Sun Jun 30 23:18:35 1996
Status: O
X-Status: