Viewer-Managed Marketplace migration commences July 23rd

Update, July 30th: The lab has issued a new version of the VMM viewer, and the links to the download in this article have been updated accordingly.

Update, July 20th: Linden Lab have given the following explanation for the acceleration with VMM migration: “As many of you noticed, we did shorten the time line to get Merchants migrated to VMM. This is due primarily to the need to get Merchants off of Xstreet, as it was down for a weekend in early July, forcing us to accelerate our dates.” (With thanks to Whirly Fizzle for the pointer to the comment.)

Coming by way of the Commerce blog, Linden Lab has announced that the Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM) capabilities are now released, and that automated migrations of SL Marketplace items is to commence on Thursday, July 23rd.

Migration will commence at 21:00 on July 23rd, and each weekday thereafter until all all stores on the Marketplace have been migrated.

The blog post lays out the core aspects of the migration process, which I’ve summarised below – but do still please read the official post:

• All merchants will receive e-mail at the beginning of the migration process, and another once it has completed
• Merchants with around 5K or more of listings will have their migration scheduled, and will receive an additional e-mail for the Lab providing them with advanced notice – see additional notes below
• Migration will occur weekdays between 21:00 SLT in the evening and 09:00 SLT the following morning
• A Merchant will not be able to modify their store while items are being migrated, but sales of items that are not in the process of being migrated will continue
• Merchants who have had their stores migrated to VMM  should use the  Second Life VMM Viewer (or a TPV which offers VMM support) in order to manage their Marketplace inventory.

It’s also worth pointing out that the automatic migration process will not run against Magic Box items; these must be manually migrated, and no date has yet been given as to when support for Magic Boxes will discontinue. However, this notice from the Lab should perhaps be taken by those who do still have items in Magic Boxes as indicative that they should start planning to migrate them to VMM.

Both the automated and manual migration process have been undergoing beta testing for some time now, and most reports on both have been positive.

VMM has been moving in this direction for that last couple of months. However, it had been thought that actual migration wouldn’t commence until after the VMM viewer code had been promoted to the release viewer. Given that the Lab tends to prefer promoted a viewer every other week, and this week (week #29) has already seen the attachment fixes viewer to release status, it would appear that migration might be starting prior to the VMM viewer being similarly promoted.

To help people get to grips with the Viewer-Managed Marketplace, the Lab have produced a number of resources, and those unfamiliar with VMM are referred to them for further information.

• VMM FAQ
• VMM Knowledge Base article
• Tutorial videos:
  • 1. Learning Listing, Version & Stock Folders
  • 2. Creating a New Listing
  • 3. Updating a Listing
  • 4. Migrating Listings & Checking for Errors
• VMM viewer download link (updated July 30th)