Technology Meetings in Worcester

Yesterday I travelled to the Worcester Registry of Deeds for two meetings with representatives from other registries and the Secretary of State's office on technology topics.

The first meeting dealt with the continued roll-out of electronic recording around the state. Now, Middlesex North and South, Plymouth and Hampden are the only registries using this technolgy, but Worcester should be joining us in the next few months with a new system which, if all goes according to plan, will allow document submitters to send electronic documents directly to the registry without going through a third-party intermediary (which is how the rest of us do it). I'm not sure which way is better but I do know that this technology is still in its very early stages, so it's wise to try out a variety of methods before deciding which one works best in Massachusetts.

The second meeting dealt with the new MassLandRecords website which is still in operation alongside the "classic" version of MLR. Our latest testing of the new site still finds some unacceptably long response times for certain queries, so the technical people are completely focused on resolving them. By response time, I mean that a search that takes 1 second to get the result on the Classic version might take 6 seconds to respond on the new version. Since the new system is purposely designed to operate faster, the fact that it's running slower indicates something isn't working quite right. Until that's resolved, both websites will remain in full operation.