While the rest of the world was uncorking champagne bottles to celebrate the new year, we celebrated by figurately smashing a champagne bottle against the hull of our latest release.

And while you might have started your party several hours before midnight, we actually started this party way back in October when an earlier blog post of mine announced two of these features.

So join me in a toast to the release’s key details:

Call it some form of sentimentality from years of yore:  our Thawte SSL 123 TLS / SSL certificate carried a requirement that certificate signing requests (CSRs) must include a ST (State) field.  Alas, SSL 123 is a domain validated (DV) product – and DV doesn’t require any organizational information.  Therefore, I Auld Lang Signed-off on removing that ST requirement by making the field optional – and making SSL 123 carry the same requirements as all our other DV products.

Like a New Year’s Resolution that we just couldn’t seem to stop making, we had defaulted reuse of domain control validation (DCV) to ON for subsequent orders.  Now we’ve added a parameter such that you can choose to keep it enabled or just turn it off. This means that if you don’t change anything, everything will remain as it always was. If you want to add additional security to your customers, you can now do so on a per-order basis.

But the party didn’t stop there.  We added a corresponding account-level setting, which allows you to change the default value for all ensuing orders in your account (i.e. to default to not reuse DCV, but only turn it ON for specific orders).

Note that all these changes are on our legacy Symantec partner platform. As you might be wondering why there’s not many updates, we’re excitedly working on getting our CertCentral platform to where we want it to be – and we’re seeing great progress in that! Keep checking this blog to get more updates on our progress.

Our communications to you are only half of open two-way communications:  I want you to take a more active role in providing the other half of communications.  Hence my continued interest in hearing directly from you about what you’d like me to discuss or explain in this blog or in my quarterly roadmap review vlog.  You can reach me on LinkedIn or Twitter.